Full Speaker List

Devin Anderson

Cprime

Devin Anderson has been Chief Product Officer and Head of Product at multiple companies. As a product management leader for the last 15+ years, he has delivered enterprise IT solutions in endpoint management, endpoint security, and asset management totaling over $1B in sales. Today, he balances between being a head of product and a strategic product coach for Cprime where he helps organizations be more strategic with their product teams.
Devin visits us from southern Utah, where he and his family enjoy contributing to the tech presence in the area, all while being surrounded by some of the most beautiful vistas.

Session: Metrics that Matter in the Boardroom – Measuring More Than Progress

Mike Brevoort

Slack

Mike Brevoort is Director of Engineering for Workflows at Slack. He was the founder and CEO of Missions, a messaging based workflow platform acquired by Slack in 2018. Mike has over 20 years experience in startups and established companies in SaaS, EdTech, Healthcare, Engineering and Financial Services. Mike lives with his family in Colorado where he is a reluctant runner and a procrastinating cyclist.

Session: How Slack builds Slack

Jackie DeFreitas

Independent

Jackie is an Agile coach, executive, and leader with over ten years of experience leading Agile change in organizations. She is passionate about transformational change and how organizations as systems evolve toward Business Agility. Specifically around culture and environments that create great places for people to come to work and enjoy what they do. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech and a member of Women In Agile. 

Session: Is your Organizational culture messing with your Agile success?

Steve Elliott

Atlassian

Steve Elliott has a proven track record of leading successful teams and transforming large scale organizations to agile. His software startup AgileCraft was recently acquired by Atlassian, dedicated to pioneering enterprise agility, for 166M USD. Prior to this, he has already led several other startups, sales, support, strategy development, and engineering teams.
His passion lies in designing tools and finding ways to help organizations scale all aspects of business operations. He enables leaders to excel in their management duties through the use of agile to transform the way they do business.
Now Head of Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft), Steve’s brainchild makes all work visible across an enterprise in real time, finds consensus on roadmaps, scope, and dependencies across teams and portfolios, and uses value engineering to rapidly drive value and lean thinking to accelerate digital strategies.

Neil Fasen

Best Buy

Neil Fasen has been an agile evangelist and practitioner for more than a decade, helping large companies adopt agility and product management at scale. 
Over his 11+ years at Target, Neil worked with both teams and executives to foster a culture of continuous learning and aligned autonomy. Neil was as a founding member of Target’s first mobile teams and helped institutionalize agile practices that became the foundation of Target’s Digital product model. He was also a key leader on the Cartwheel team, one of Target’s earliest cross-functional product teams. He established and led agile coaching in Target’s Digital organization and created a product planning cadence that went on to influence prioritization and alignment processes across all of Target.
In his current role as Senior Director of Product Practices at Best Buy, Neil is responsible for maturing product management routines and increasing the effectiveness of cross-product delivery.

Session: OKRs in the Real World

Michaele Gardner

Gardner, Kievoet, & Associates

Michaele Gardner started out as a counselor at an emergency crisis line. Clients were too messy: defined inputs did not lead to predetermined outputs. So she moved into the world of IT and has not looked back, but has always stayed closed to her roots in counseling. As a COBOL developer, Michaele loved diving into the clean logic and flow of well written code as well as working with other developers. Her next iteration was to move the problem space closer to the solution space which led her to Object Oriented coding. Landing as a Java developer on an XP team brought together her interests in psychology, flow, teamwork and problem solving. Her next step was to help engineers and organizations understand business value at a micro and macro level.
Currently she can be found applying neuroscience concepts to technical teams and software engineering students. She has successfully applied agile concepts and principles in multiple non-software focused spaces – from teaching undergraduate and graduate classes to building a real estate rental portfolio. She is an executive coach who co-creates new and exciting career paths with clients. Michaele is addicted to Post-it Super Sticky notes and is a fanatic about helping teams and people create a psychologically safe, innovate space where motivation, trust and support exist. One of her personal mantras is shamelessly taken from Kent Beck who says: “Turn up the good.”

Session: Why worry about putting on the oxygen mask first when you can fly the f!#%^ plane?

Brian Hackerson

Independent

Brian is a reformed functional manager, turned agile coach. Since that personal transformation, he has become curious about neuroscience with a keen interest in understanding flow state, the greatest place to be.  At his core, he is a data enthusiast, having background in healthcare data analytics before it became cool.  Using common agile metrics applied in uncommon ways, he has shaped his personal agile journey.
Brian enjoys teaching Scrum, coaching teams and individuals to foster growth mindset, with an eye on creating positive outcomes for teams and individuals.  Right now he is volunteering his time to teach Scrum in Community Education in Apple Valley, Minnesota, as well as sharing Scrum basics with students at local universities.

Session: Why worry about putting on the oxygen mask first when you can fly the f!#%^ plane?

Sarah Klarich

USAA

Sarah Klarich is the Director, Coaching and Skill Development for Business Agility at USAA. Prior to joining USAA she coached and consulted at various companies across multiple industries including telecom, airlines, financial, and utilities.  Sarah is a passionate change agent and has been active in the agile community through volunteering.

Session: Stealth Agility – Using the Culture you have

Christi Krautbauer

Thomson Reuters

Christi Krautbauer is the Director of People Strategy & Planning at Thomson Reuters. She is passionate about bringing agile ways of working to life across organizations. With a background in product management and design thinking, Christi recently helped build the HR Consulting pool at Thomson Reuters. She is the architect of the group’s business agility practices and provided agility coaching to get the team off the ground. In her current role, Christi supports the People Function’s overall strategy and priority initiatives. 
Christi also co-chairs the Women@Thomson Reuters group here in Minnesota, and has previously chaired the Aspire to Lead women’s leadership conference. She is a frequent presenter and workshop facilitator in the areas of business agility, design thinking and women’s leadership. Christi has presented a Grace Hopper, Aspire to Lead, the National Association for Executive Women’s Twin Cities conference, the Conference Board’s Annual Women’s Leadership Conference, and the International Society for Performance Improvement’s annual conference. 
In addition to her work at Thomson Reuters, Christi is active in the Twin Cities community and is a finalist for this year’s Team WomenMN Community Impact WaveMaker award. She serves on the board of directors for the Diaper Bank of Minnesota, co-chairs the PTO at her children’s school and previously served on the board of directors for the National Kidney Foundation in Minnesota.  She lives in St. Paul with her husband and three awesome kiddos.

Session: On “The Importance of Being Agile”

David Laribee

Independent

David Laribee is an independent coach, author, teacher, and speaker in the area of software-intensive product development. He believes in the power of collaboration, simplicity, and feedback.

Over the last 20 years, David has built teams and products for companies of all shapes and sizes. He’s founded startups and consulted in Fortune 50 enterprises. He’s developed digital products in a wide variety of domains: banking, retail, consumer electronics, insurance, beverage distribution, and higher education (to name a few). David is a two-time Microsoft MVP in C# and Solutions Architecture and co-founder of the ALT.NET movement, which spawned dozens of user groups across the globe dedicated to open source and modern engineering practices.

Before striking out on his own, David coached the product development team at VersionOne, a market leader in agile project management tools.

David started work life at the early age of five on a farm in Upstate NY — an upbringing that accounts for his lead-from-the-front approach, appreciation for small/cross-disciplinary teams and disdain for fake maple syrup.

Session: Sensible Metrics for Teams and Dojos

Michael Levine

US Bank

Michael Levine has been leader in lean/agile space as an executive at Wells Fargo and US Bank, now SVP/CIO for Consumer Lending & Business Banking. His teams have delivered breakthroughs in consumer lending and business banking, and dealt with the hardest problems that emerged from the mortgage default crisis. His three-book trilogy, The Tales of Agility (TheTalesOfAgility.com), use exposition and compelling stories to make learning about agile engaging regardless of technical sophistication. His latest book is People Over Process: Leadership for Agility, published October 2019.

Session: Facilitating Agility: Obligations of organizational leaders

Kelly Looney

AWS

Kelly is a 30+ year veteran in the software development arena. He has built software in everything from assembly language to Smalltalk, Unix/C, and to Kubernetes and Lambda. He has taken an abiding interest in improving organization’s software delivery from Agile, to DevOps, to Serverless and NextOps.
 
Kelly has been lucky enough to work directly with luminaries  such as Kent Beck, Jez Humble, Damon Edwards, Craig Larman, Kenny Rubin, and Dick Gabriel.  He has worked in successful startups (ParcPlace, Activerse, Skytap)  and consulted (Thoughtworks, CAP Gemini, BAH) with all types of organizations in a variety of industries. At AWS, Kelly works with partners in the DevOps space to help solve customer problems and set the stage for modern high velocity, extra stable, and secure systems.

Session: Agile and Next Generation Software

Laura O’Brien

Travelers

Leveraging a background in quantitative methods, a passion for collaboration and keen eye for patterns Laura O’Brien is a self-proclaimed dot-connector.   Over the past 25 years in technology she has worn several hats including analyst, developer, tester, architect, strategist, change agent and coach.
Laura spent the first half of her career as a consultant working with Fortune 100 clients, not-for profit organizations and startups across a variety of industries and is currently a Senior Technology Director at Travelers Insurance focused on Agile Transformation and Learning across the enterprise. 
When not connecting dots, Laura to is an admitted home-ec nerd and is known to cook and sew for her family, friends and an occasional stranger or two.

Session: Agile Value: Systems Thinking and Balancing Autonomy at Scale

Mary Poppendieck

Poppendieck, LLC

Mary Poppendieck’s first job was programming the #2 Electronic Switching System at Bell Labs in 1967. She has worked on systems that control roll-goods processes, interpret digitized images, and support statistical process control. She spearheaded the implementation of a Just-in-Time production system and led new product development teams, commercializing products ranging from digital controllers to lighting systems. 
Mary is a popular writer and speaker, and coauthor of the book Lean Software Development: an Agile Toolkit, which was awarded the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. A sequel, Implementing Lean Software Development: from Concept to Cash was published in 2006. A third book, Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point was published in November 2009, and a fourth book, The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions was published in 2013.

Session: Too Many Metrics

Kurt Schmidt

Foundry

Kurt Schmidt is the President of Foundry, a digital product, and experience agency and hosts a weekly Podcast named the “Schmidt List” where he interviews industry leaders to learn their thoughts on bridging modern management techniques, design thinking, and cutting-edge technology for our ever-increasing “agile” world.

The Schmidt List Podcast LIVE: Leading by Example for a Purpose-Driven Culture

Molly Stiehm

Thomson Reuters

Molly is certified Agility Coach supporting employees at Thomson Reuters in their transformation to becoming good Agilists. With over 15 years of experience as a people leader, she continues to explore the extraordinary power of servant leadership.
She’s also passionate about the power of an organization’s culture, and is a certified facilitator of Senn Delaney culture work, which has reached more than 30,000 Thomson Reuters employees around the globe.
Molly is a HUGE believer in the power of self-awareness and intentional continuous improvement, and frequently lead discussions on Mindfulness and the ability to improve Emotional Intelligence.
When she’s not at work, Molly is still focused on the power of self-awareness and intentional continuous improvement! She also really enjoy outdoor exercise, reading, and spending precious time with her husband and two great kids (ages 11 and 8).

Session: On “The Importance of Being Agile”

Milinda Rambel Stone

Provation Medical

Milinda Rambel Stone is an executive security leader with extensive experience building & leading security programs including information security governance, vulnerability management, incident investigation & response, security awareness, and risk management & compliance. 
With more than 15 years of experience in creating and managing large-scale information security programs in technology, healthcare, and financial services, today Milinda puts this expertise to work as a  at Provation Medical where she is the Vice President & CISO.  Her focus is the creation and operational oversight of a global security program for this healthcare SaaS organization.

Session: The Value of DevSecOps and its Organizational Impact. A CSO’s perspective

Lynn Winter

ManageDigital

Lynn is a Digital Strategist and Project Manager who combines 19 years of experience in content strategy, user experience, and project management to bring a holistic approach to her work. She has spoken at numerous local and national conferences on a variety of topics and hosts an annual conference for Digital Project Managers called Manage Digital (http://managedigital.io/). You can connect with her at lynnwintermn.com.

Session: Conquering Burnout