You are a Product Owner working hard to maintain a value-driven product backlog. That means you continually check in with what you mean by value. For us, that means checking in with your customers in new heartfelt ways. What adds value to them? What provides them function, commodity and delight? How can you act in love and service to them? Designing empathy into your product feature sets brings you into a deep relationship with your customers. Design from your head and heart to your customers' head and heart. Fortunately for all of us as product owners, George Kembel and his team at the d.School at Stanford University have been working for a number of years on approaches to help us develop customer empathy and to act on it. Having had the good fortune of working with George and his brother John, we have created a design empathy approach that draws from the d.School work. We have added some of our own brainstorming divergence and convergence approaches for data collection and knowledge massaging. This session affords you the opportunity to learn how to conduct our set of empathy activities: from empathy interviews all the way through a complete "problem" statement. Interactively in a workshop setting, we'll work in small teams to complete 2 of the steps of the overall process.
Think about someone who is deeply passionate about how we move agile approaches up and out into our businesses, our world. This person has a deep conviction that each and every one of us deserves workplaces where our leaders cultivate love, generate energy, inspire audacity, all of this in service of the people who love what they do. You’d also discover that this person’s conviction comes from decades in the agile domain, guiding individuals, teams, large portfolios, executives and entire organizations. Writing, “Collaboration Explained” is just one contribution to the agile canon. These all provide proof of this person’s deep heart dedicated to how we continue to grow, how we apply principles and practices from disciplines such as systems thinking, design thinking, and LEAP leadership in our agile world. There is also an element of playing with quantuum physics. Now, who is this person? Jean Tabaka.