Tag: Product Ownership

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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/

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.

Five books every Product Owner should read

To continue my with my book recommendations (check the five books every ScrumMaster should read, and five books Agile Leader shall read), I have several books here, I would recommend every Product Owner to read. It’s a mix which will help you to understand Agile Product Ownership, Discovery and delivery process in much broader perspective. Enjoy reading 🙂

  1. Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects is a practical guide to impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organizations make an impact with software. Impact mapping helps to create better plans and roadmaps that ensure alignment of business and delivery, and are easily adaptable to change. Impact mapping fits nicely into several current trends in software product management and release planning, including goal-oriented requirements engineering, frequent iterative delivery, agile and lean software methods, lean startup product development cycles, and design thinking.
  2. Agile Estimating and Planning is the definitive, practical guide to estimating and planning agile projects. In the book, Agile Alliance co-founder Mike Cohn discusses the philosophy of the agile estimate and planning, and shows you exactly how to get the job done with real-world examples and case studies. This book is a must-have agile estimation tool for your development toolbox.
  3. User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features.
  4. Innovation Games®: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play is a must-read for anyone involved in market research and product or service development (which, when you think about it, means virtually everyone). Innovation is incredibly simple. All you have to do is accurately predict what your customers want, need, and will pay for. Oh, wait. Sorry. That’s actually very hard. At least with traditional tools. So how do you find this information? Well, you can just ask your customers what they want. The problem, of course, is that with most truly breakthrough innovations, current and potential customers don’t actually know what they want before they see it. If you just try to deliver what they already want, you’ll never truly innovate. Even worse, traditional market research practices prove that often, customers have trouble articulating what, exactly, they want in the first place.
  5. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is about a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs – in companies of all sizes – a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late.