Let’s talk about powerful conversations! We all know how to lead a constructive conversation, right? Then why is it so difficult to have those conversations with people at work, especially those in powerful positions that show resistance to change?

Learning to control and direct conversations takes understanding and practice.

Join this session to become a real influencer! Learn how to prepare for difficult conversations and get more successful results from them. We will use Dave Gray’s Empathy Mapping and The Four Rs model from Agile Conversations (Squirrel and Fredrick) to improve our conversational skills in order to be more influential without power.

In the session you will learn how to communicate more effectively with the people needed to achieve positive change. You will leave with a self-revised version of a difficult conversation and a practical model to use when you get back to work.

Escaping legacy is hard. You have a product in the hands of users, but delivery gets slow, defects are common, and when you want to build a new feature no one can say how long it’s going to take. Engineering is talking about a rewrite, but you can’t just stop and wait.

In this workshop I show how you, as product owner, QA, manager, or engineering lead, can use familiar practices, like Story Mapping and Example Mapping to improve testing, plan refactoring, or even re-work, iteratively and safely.

Assuming a legacy system, in this workshop we start with an existing app and reverse engineer it:
* discover what the functionality is,
* capture it in tests, whether low resolution, or high resolution, and
* prioritize to integrate with our plans for new work and risk

In the workshop you will go through discovery of a familiar existing app, and practice using Story Mapping and Example Mapping to bring the app under test. You work in small groups through the exercises, and can experience how this generates insight and translates into both a solid test strategy, as well as the freedom to be able plan work on a legacy system again.