Monday, February 16, 2015

3/19 - The Agile Manifesto after 14 years - why it is still key to great teams

RSVP now to attend this event with Mike Roberts.

Since first coming across Kent’s original ‘white book’ in 2000 I’ve been a proponent of ‘agile’ software techniques. I’ve been on both high- and low-ceremony teams, been to more than a fair share of meetups and conferences, and yet I still believe that the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/) is the best grounding for any team I’ve been part of.
In this session I’ll be looking at why I keep coming back to the manifesto, and why I recommend other teams do the same.
Bio:
Mike Roberts
Mike has spent 15 years in the software development industry, and a fair few more before that spending time programming in strange computer languages when he really should have been socializing. His first program moved a robot turtle around the floor - he still remembers it fondly. Mike spent 4 years at ThoughtWorks in the early 2000s where he was part of the blossoming agile software movement, running open source projects and speaking at conferences. Since moving to the US in 2006 Mike has spent time in various technical and management roles at the New York Stock Exchange, DRW Trading, and most recently as VP, Engineering at Intent Media where he manages the 50 person (and growing!) technology team.

Friday, February 6, 2015

3/5 - Learning From Live Systems w/ Josh Seiden

RSVP now to attend this free meetup on March 5 with Josh Seiden in NYC. 

We take for granted that the systems we work on now are social systems. Sites like Amazon have used user-generated content for over 20 years. Twitter and Facebook are each about a decade old. But even though social systems are now commonplace, the methods we use to design, build, and launch them are still based on techniques we developed while working on last-generation technology. So how can product teams cope?

As agile and lean practitioners know, iterative methods play an important part in our work on these systems. In recent projects, Josh Seiden has been working with teams to link these methods together in a “learning-from-live-systems” approach. In this talk, Josh will take a deep dive into a recent project that illustrates this way of working. Come hear how the team behind Taproot Plus was able to invent and launch an online marketplace for skilled volunteers in just a few months. Online marketplace projects like this one can easily burn through budget and never launch. Instead, we've been live since nearly Day One. Come see how our small team of designers, developers, and product managers has carefully launched and developed this new business in a way that minimized spend and risk, and maximized the chances of success.

Bio:
Josh Seiden
Josh Seiden has been creating great technology products for more than 20 years. As a designer and leader, Josh has worked in hardware and software, consumer and enterprise, mobile, web, and desktop. He is currently a Principal in Neo’s NYC office. Earlier, he was head of product design at Wall Street innovator Liquidnet, and lead pioneering interaction design teams at Cooper. He is a founder and past President of the Interaction Design Association. He is the co-author of Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.