In this conversation, Tom Henriksen talks about
- Starting a career in sales and then getting into tech
- Getting into Agile, as part of a team adopting Agile practices, under a manager’s guidance
- His experience of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager
- Understanding the importance of human skills in agile teams
- Some interesting learnings from patterns of behavior in teams, particularly those based on misconceptions
- The fact that humans are hard, code is easy
- Learning to ‘talk their terms’ when connecting with executives, from the Dale Carnegie’s book
- The importance of empathy, to be able to understand the other person’s perspective and context and use appropriate language and create solutions that would meet their needs
- How a visit to observe users for a day gave insights into the what their solution needs to do
- Having an experimental mindset
- The importance of managing up, when it comes to adoption of agile practices in a team
- Why rinse-and-repeat would not work when applying what worked in one context identically in a different context
- Context matters – and, like many agile coaches say, it depends.
- Stop selling agile, start aligning
- Being aware of the dangers of gaming the system, when there is too much stress only on quantitative measurements and metrics
- The trigger for Tom to launch the Agile and DevOps online summits, long before the pandemic hit and all conferences moved online
- How he is able to bring in multiple perspectives by having track chairs
- Some experiments being tried in this year’s summit, such as live sessions, gamification and the structure of the three days along the Shu Ha Ri themes
- Some changes or shifts in themes he has seen over the last 5 years
- His thoughts on curating the content from the summit over the years
- His suggestions for early stage and mid-career professionals
For more details on the Agile Online Summit happening this year between October 25 and 27, you can visit https://agileonlinesummit.com/
Tom Henricksen is a problem-solving technology professional. He has worked in various roles in technology for over twenty years. Tom has learned how to solve challenging issues in technology and lead technical teams
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhenricksen/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TomHenricksen
