My Talk at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2017

From 20/20 Hindsight to ESP at Optimizely

On a chilly fall day a few weeks back, I gave a talk at the cozy Lean Kanban Central Europe in Hamburg, Germany. I was honored to be invited to give a reprise of the talk I gave with Keith earlier this year at Lean Kanban North America.

I spoke about Optimizely’s software development process, and how we’ve used ideas from Lean Kanban and ESP (Enterprise Service Planning) to help us ship faster, with higher quality, to better meet customer needs. Overall it went well, but I had too much content and rushed at the end. If I do this talk again, I would cut some slides and make the presentation more focused and concise. Watch the talk below.

Jeff Zych - From 20/20 Hindsight to ESP at Optimizely @ LKCE17 from Lean Kanban Central Europe on Vimeo.

Epilogue

One of the cool things this conference does is give the audience green, yellow, and red index cards they can use to give feedback to the speakers. Green indicates you liked the talk, red means you didn’t like it, and yellow is neutral.

I got just one red card, with the comment, “topic title not accurate (this is not ESP?!).” In retrospect, I realized this person is correct — my talk really doesn’t talk about ESP much. I touch on it, but that was what Keith covered. Since he dropped out, I mostly cut those sections of the presentation since I can’t speak as confidently about them. If I did this talk solo again, I would probably change the title. So thank you, anonymous commenter 🙏

I also got two positive comments on green cards:

Thanks for sharing. Some useful insights + good to see it used in industry. - Thanks.

And:

Thank you! Great examples, (maybe less slides next time?) but this was inspiring

I also got some good tweets, like this and this.