Agile Team and Product Building: Our 2012 SXSW Panel Proposals

This year’s SXSW was a great experience; we saw old friends, made new ones, gave presentations on agile games and starting Cassandra, and learned a lot from others. We’ll be back and hopefully, with your help, presenting a few of the panels we’ve proposed around the ideas of agile development, team building, and product design.

Perhaps we can convince you to vote for the “Art of Persuasion” panel? David Hendee has brought together a jury consultant, a biologist, a psychologist and an entrepreneur in a cross discipline discussion on how to harness the lessons of behavior change without necessarily changing your product.

Of course, there comes a time when you’ll want to make a change, add a feature, or develop a whole new product. So how to vet those ideas? The “Fake it Till You Make It” panel will cover tools and techniques to rapidly prototype, user test, and iterate the features in an agile design process.

The ability to rapidly deploy features on the web has become a standard and expected practice, but shifting it to native platforms such as iOS and Android, with external review processes and outdated clients, can be a tricky proposition. Developers who have gone through the transition share the lessons and tools learned in “Agile apps: effective mobile & native development”

“Continuous Planning: Story Mapping for Agile Teams” has Jeff Patton and our own Ben Lindsey, walk through not only the writing and prioritization of stories but also the importance of collecting and acting on data on the process for better planning.

Finding and retaining the right people on your team is not simply a matter of their skill or your own resources, especially when everyone else is trying to do the same. In “Company Culture During the Gold Rush”, Christian Nelson leads a discussion on how concretely communicating amorphous values plays a great part in signing up talented individuals and getting them to stay.

We don’t just want to share our experiences; we want to hear yours too, either at the sessions or over a drink. So, please follow the links above to vote; it’s an important part of the selection process. And when you see any of us next year (or sooner!), say “Hello” and we’ll grab that drink.