Sharing the stage with my mentor!

So those of you who know me, know how much I respect Daniel Terhorst-North. I got in touch with him about 2.5 years ago about his speaking style and some guidance on a talk I was framing(I am still framing it) at the time.

There has been no looking back since. He has not only given me useful feedback but also introduced me to this great new group of people (some of whom) he has worked with.

Earlier in the year, we spoke about presenting together at a conference.

And this materialised in late September ‘19. I was going to participate in Agile Business Conference in London.

We planned to do an AMA panel (Ask Me Anything) about Business Agility.

The panel included some accomplished individuals who have worked with various large scale organisations to enable them to think agile and be agile. Unfortunately, one of the panelists had to drop out at the last minute.

So we did what we knew best! Added more people to our panel on the day. We were being Agile.

I shared the stage with Daniel, Gabby, Anna, Kerry and Sam.

We had a range of interesting questions from the audience which Daniel moderated using sli.do.

Some of the questions were:

• I keep reading that Agile is dead. What does the panel think about this statement and why it doesn’t itself die? P.S. I don’t think it is, btw x
• What has been your biggest Agile “fail”, and in what ways are you a better person and professional for it?

Our most favourite question though was, ‘what have you had to unlearn and relearn in your journey?’ It made me think hard about the answer.

I unlearnt how to think in code and think like a customer. If you cannot operate as a customer of your own product then how will you understand what defines high quality? I also learnt to accept unsolicited feedback.

Sharing the stage with amazing people who I can learn so much from and then also gaining the respect of the audience as someone bringing in the engineering angle of business agility was very humbling. There was lots of lessons learnt and doing an AMA was a lot of fun. Zero prep needed and maximum output generated!