Working together effectively relies on people being able to say both "yes" and "no." But when was the last time you said "no" to your boss? And when was the last time someone gave you a "counterfeit yes" and didn't follow through with what they agreed to? This session will explore how power and positional authority affect people's ability to say no. We will also introduce three techniques to help you know that when someone says "yes," they mean it.

Company X delivered an innovative new feature, and now it’s a high priority for your team to deliver something similar. Seeing another company’s solution can push us to focusing on our speed of delivery. However, neglecting discovery work can lead to a mediocre customer response to our feature launch. This session will look at idea validation speed and the 3 types of assumptions we make when trying to catch up to our competitors. Discover what these assumptions look like in feature delivery and how to recognize which ones are the riskiest.

The idea of explaining agile to management is tricky in many ways.  One of the first things to do is to clarify assumptions. What and who is "management", what do they understand about agile, what do we understand about business, and what is important to them. These are quite often assumptions, not facts.  Then, we need to look at options to explain agile in a way align with the facts we know and what is important.  Simple. And who knows... maybe "management" is not the issue.