Having an experimental mindset with Tom Henriksen

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