We are home again from Scrum Gathering in Phoenix, USA. We had a lot of fun and got truly inspired by the components at the conference.
One of the best ways to start a new day is to find out that what you said actually had a positive impact on someone. At breakfast on the second day of Scrum gathering in Phoenix one of the participants of our workshop the previous day told me we had blew his mind by introducing the possibility to produce multiple design suggestions and compare them. Many thanks to Jayson Lane for telling me that! And thanks to all the other participants who gave us feedback on the workshop.
From the trenches
The third and final day of the conference was spent entirely on open space sessions. It’s really a treat to experience this kind of self-organisation on a grand scale, where the participants are the ones who decide what to talk about during the sessions.
We did a session on ”UX <3 Agile – From the trenches” since we had recieved a lot of questions on how we make it work following our workshop. Approximately 30 people joined in and shared their challenges, everything from how to organise UX people in Scrum development to acceptance criteria for design. We went through our experiences of what we’ve found to be the best setups and methods, a summary of the session can be found here.
New model
Besides the open space sessions, there are many elements of the Scrum gathering that are based on participation from the people attending. One example was the ignite talks. During the first day of the conference anyone could post a suggestion for a lightning talk on the wall and then all the other participants could vote on which ones they would like to hear. The nine suggestions that got the most votes got to present their talks on the second day of the conference. This level of participation from the attenders is truly inspiring, and we’ll definitely try to incorporate some of it in our own conference From Business To Buttons
