agility - Agile and Scrum Blog

Top 10 Agile conferences to attend in 2026

Every year I speak at many conferences and based on my experience I recommend some places to go for inspiration. Here is my list of Top 10 Agile conferences to attend in 2026. It’s not my intention to cover them all, I’m sharing places where I like to return. Inspiring places with interaction, high energy, and great speakers.

AgilePrague Conference is one of the best conferences in Europe. In two days, it creates unique collaborative space. You can expect short talks, afternoon workshops, and inspirational keynotes. Plus, Prague is a great city to visit so you can come early and enjoy the weekend in Prague. Join Agile Prague on Sep 21-22, 2026, Prague, Czech Republic.
Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo is organized by an enthusiastic agile community in Japan. The purpose is to provide a “Ba” (place) where practitioners share ideas among Scrum practitioners having a great diversity. Regional Gatherings provides a unique experience and even if you don’t speak Japanese, there are some talks in English and other translated. Join me and the local community on January 7-9, 2026.
XP Days Benelux is a conference with parallel workshops for experienced audience. This year it’s going to be in Belgium on Nov 26-27, 2026.
Agile Coach Camp Cologne, Germany, Apr 30-May 2, 2026, is a global gathering, it is an open space event over 3 days of creativity, inspiration and co-working on new work-related topics.
AgileDC is a one-day conference with a motto: Of the People, By the People, and For the People. Organized by local community and it has a great atmosphere. Washington DC metro area, Oct 26, 2026.
AgileByExample, Warsaw, Poland, Oct 12-14, 2026, brings three days of intensive, example-driven content featuring global experts and deep dives into strategic agile governance and data-powered decision-making. This is where cutting-edge agile meets real-world application.
Scan Agile is one of my favorite conferences. It’s where the future of Agile takes shape. This year is planned for March 17-18, 2026, in Helsinki, Finland.
Agile Testing Days are almost a festival not a traditional conference. The full week of tutorials, talks, workshops, and networking events is just awesome. Join Testing Days even if you are not a tester. It’s in Potsdam, Germany on Nov 16-19, 2026.
LeSS Conference is from practitioners for practitioners. Since 2016, LeSS Conferences is where LeSS practitioners share their LeSS experience and learn from new experiments. Book your time for October 8-9, 2026, Tokyo, Japan.
Global Agility + Innovation Summit, Washington DC metro area, May 13, 2026, explores the Age of AI, focusing on building AI-powered products to leading in AI-powered environments.

The selection is based on my personal preference and experiences from those events.

Other conferences to consider this year

There are many great events that didn’t make it to this list, so please share your suggestions with us and we add them to the following list.

Agile on the Beach is great event to attend and explore the summer in Cornwall, UK on July 2 – 3, 2026.
Org Topologies Summit is a single track conference. Expect a curated mix of focused talks, hands-on workshops, engaging simulations, guided group discussions, and practical problem-solving. Mark your calendar for Oct 16, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Additional events: https://agilegatherings.com/

The Power of Continuous Improvement

Very often, people are expecting changes to happen instantly. They are impatient, they want everything now. But changes take time and effort. Change is definitely not a straightforward activity; it never goes as you plan it. In order to succeed with change in your organization, you need to be creative, innovative, and playful. And on top of that, you need to be patient. One of the reasons why I like Scrum, is because it’s incremental and iterative not only in delivering the value to the customers, but also in its own implementation. Step-by-step, you are figuring out what does it mean to be agile for us, how to use Scrum, and how shall we implement the different artifacts and events. There is no cookbook, you need to figure out your own way.

At the beginning, don’t look for any perfection, just start with anything that is good enough. You need to have a team that can deliver at least some sort of limited value. A team that has a chance to become at least a bit cross-functional. A team that over the time can take over the responsibility and ownership and become self-managing. Once you have this starting point, a team willing to give it a shot, all you need is to incrementally inspect and adapt. Small, little iterations. Every iteration, you discover what is working and make it stick; each iteration reveals what needs to be improved and comes up with an actionable step for the next sprint to improve it. It doesn’t have to be a big change, quite the opposite. Small steps work generally much better. This way, they’re safe to try and more likely to happen. They don’t look like they can change the world instantly, but if you look back where you’ve been six months ago, you realize you’ve made a huge step.

Overall, I would say, if you don’t take anything out of the Scrum framework but Retrospectives, do them regularly and make sure they bring incremental changes, you end up at a much better stage than you’ve been before. Being agile is about being adaptive. Be creative and take it one step at a time. Play with the change. An incremental change is the key practice that can make you truly Agile. It’s not about tools. It’s a different way of thinking, and incremental changes are a key part of that new way of thinking and approaching things.

Backlog is not a Linear List

“It’s all about Product Backlog. Product Owner should manage it. Prioritize it. Fill it with User Stories.” Sounds familiar? It’s typical at certain stage of agile transformation to focus on building a Product Backlog. And use Jira for that. You find such linear to-do lists in almost every organization at the beginning of their agile journey. And though Product Backlog is very important tool as it brings clarity and align people around the same business goals, it’s also one of the most misunderstood and misused tools. It often starts with a good intention, Product Owner asking customer what they want. And they, in a good intention, brainstorm all the possible functionalities you can imagine. And the Backlog/scope keeps growing while the time expectations stay the same. That’s very common start of a big disappointment with Agile. “It didn’t help us. It’s not faster!” people say, and they are right. Agile is not the way how to deliver more functionality faster. Quite the opposite. It’s a way how to achieve higher business value faster, and those are two different things.

So, if you want to get more business value, start with the backlog. But this time, you’re not asking what you want to be implemented but instead ask for needs and look for a minimal functionality to be implemented to satisfy those needs. 80% of the value is in 20% of the functionality and that’s exactly what good Product Backlog should identify. The higher value items first, the rest later or never.

Good Product Backlog is co-created in collaboration with customer, stakeholders, and team members. They all need to uncover the business needs. They all need to develop an empathy for the customers. In most of the cases Product Backlog they create together is not a linear list that would fit traditional tools like Jira or Excel, instead very often we use Story Mapping technique to create multidimensional maps, or impact mapping technique to create a mind map, or visualize the product as a tree and prune the branches. Nothing that would look like a linear to do list. All the techniques have one thing in common; they focus on the business value and the customer needs. They don’t describe the solution. The how in Scrum should be uncovered during the Sprint in team collaboration. So, forget on the requirements, stop asking your customers what they want, and instead focus on uncovering their needs and together visualize the value in your Product Backlog.

Join the 10th anniversary of the Agile Prague Conference

I started organizing a conference because I wanted to bring interesting people to the Czech Republic, to Prague where I live. I wanted to give people here some sort of feeling of what it means to be agile across the globe, how different organizations do things, what is a hot topic nowadays in the world, and give them an opportunity for two days to learn from the best agile speakers.

The first year we started small and run an experiment as a track of the WebExpo conference and because people liked it, we decided to start a full dedicated conference called Agile Prague. This year we are celebrating a 10^th year anniversary. I guess time flies.

Agile Prague is always on Mon-Tue in September so you can enjoy the weekend in Prague and connect pleasure with a bit of learning. We start creating a program already in January, while I speak & travel for different events, I also search for interesting speakers and inspirational stories so many of our speakers are joining on our invitation.

This year you can join us on Mon-Tue Sep 19-20, 2022. We are having two parallel tracks of short practical talks, where people can deep dive into the topics during the open space each day. The entire conference is in English and the topic is “Sustainable Agility”.

To give you some idea about the program, we have several keynotes presented this year:

Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm will help you to “Improve Transformation results in corporate organizations with Adaptivity that fits”. Many organizations struggle to adopt agile in a way that delivers on its promise to make the company fast, flexible and efficient. Alexey and Roland created a model called Adaptivity Fit, that helps you to create a map to guide your agile transformational journey.

Boris Glogger is in the Agile and Scrum space almost forever. I was in his Scrum class many years ago and I still remember it. During the conference, he will share his experience with us presenting his keynote “Let’s do it again – the role of agile consulting for a sustainable world”.

Evan Leybourn will explore “The Shape of Agility” and what it takes to build the organization ready for no matter what the future brings. Evan is the co-founder of Business Agility Institute which has the best collection of curated content about business agility.

Pat Guariglia will talk about “Quiet Resistance | An understated force”. Change is hard. Transforming to an agile mindset, environment, and way of working is always challenging. Could agile transformations be challenged with something more basic and fundamental, something more core to human behavior? The success of agile depends so much on social interaction and collaboration.

Richard Cheng and Karim Harbott will close the conference with “What is Business Agility and Why It’s Important”. Richard and Karim explore why business agility is critical for our teams, organizations, and leaders and why they need to understand the concept and values around Business Agility.

And together with them, we are bringing over 30 awesome speakers from all around the world.

Join us at Agile Prague Conference Sep 19-20,2022 agileprague.com.

Agile Leader

Over the last two decades, agile shifted from software teams to organizations. We talk about different cultures, agile organization, agile leadership, agile HR, agile finance, all over business agility. Simply the ability to embrace agile values and principles at the organizational level and change the way organizations run their business. It’s a fundamental change that is more than just implementing some framework.

“Business agility creates an organization best able to serve its customer, no matter what the future brings.”

I found this definition fascinating. In today’s complex, fast-changing, and unpredictable world, agile organizations are good at responding to the nowadays challenges. Agile brings flexibility, allows you to respond to changes fast, learn through the iterations, inspect and adapt. In order to be successful, organizations need to serve its customer, no matter what the future brings. Fixed plans are failing as the business environment is not stable enough. All that matters is creativity and flexibility.

In my second English book published by Addison Wesley – The Agile Leader: Leveraging the Power of Influence I’m looking at organizational agility and focusing on the shift required from the leaders and organizations. Through practical exercises and assessments, you learn how to unleash your potential, become a better catalyst and community builder, sensibly apply transparency, improve functions from HR to finance, and guide entire organizations towards greater agility. Agility at this level is not about practices, nor frameworks. Though those are good at the beginning, as they are helpful in creating an environment with high transparency, autonomy, and collaboration, the real impact we need to create goes way beyond that. Creating a culture that supports innovations and creative solutions is a pre-requisite for real organizational change.

So how does agile start at the organizational level? You can say it starts with a management decision or training, but I would say it all starts with a dream. Is that dream strong enough to leverage the discomfort caused by changing the way we work? Is it strong enough for you? Or let me ask you this: If you won a lottery, would you be still going to work trying to make it happen? Or would you better give up and take a rest? And I’m not speaking about having a vacation to relax for a while, but is the vision important enough for you to hang around even if you don’t need to get paid? No change is smooth and agile brings a fundamental shift of values and culture, so you better have a strong reason for the change.

Being an agile leader is a journey. It always starts with you. You need to change first, the others will follow. Agile leaders need to have a vision that will motivate people to join their effort and work together to achieve it. They need to create a collaborative environment, with high trust, and transparency where the feedback is natural. They need to motivate people by giving them purpose, autonomy, and a learning environment.