FlowCon

Beyond Agile: Product innovation at Google, Airbnb, Spotify, Vinted & Amazon

Apr 6, 2025 • 3 min


What truly distinguishes Google, Airbnb, Spotify, Vinted or Amazon as world-class product companies? This talk goes beyond the conventional “agile” framework to explore how these organizations create a seamless flow across discovery, delivery, and innovation, ensuring that impactful products are delivered consistently.

You've built it, now you support it

Apr 5, 2025 • 3 min


Humans make mistakes, it’s a fact of life. Despite our best intentions, and no matter how many checks we put in place, sometimes things go wrong. It’s no different with software. To move at speed then it’s inevitable that production issues will happen. Sometimes it’s your code that doesn’t work as expected, sometimes dependencies break, sometimes infrastructure breaks. Sometimes that once in a lifetime event happens. Again.

You don't hate OKRs! You hate the System!

Apr 5, 2025 • 2 min


“If you hate OKRs, someone is doing them wrong. Maybe you, maybe your boss.” -Christina Wodtke.

Seeing the world through a different lens

Apr 5, 2025 • 3 min


We see the world through the lens of all our experiences. This is probably obvious to most, but what is probably less apparent is that we also carry a coherent mental model of how we expect the world around us to behave. A preconceived notion of what to expect in any given situation, one that even goes beyond the basic laws of nature and common human behaviour. It is so ingrained that we do not know we even have it until made aware of it. Like do you assume predictability because science assumes determinism, or do you accept unpredictability because everything is contextual?

Myths and Legends About Big Tech

Apr 5, 2025 • 3 min


Is working in Big Tech really like the movies? Do Big Tech engineers have infinite budgets and free rein? Does “10x” talent actually exist?

Level Collapse (and How to Rise Out of It)

Apr 5, 2025 • 1 min


Without knowing how or where to provide higher-level vision, strategy and flow management, leaders often find themselves working at the operational level, or, using the metaphor of “flight levels,” in a state of “level collapse.”

AI and developer obsolescence: Is this the beginning of the end?

Apr 5, 2025 • 5 min


Everything looks solvable if you ignore most of the complications. Many things look impossible when you’re overwhelmed by the details.

You don't talk about that at work!

Oct 19, 2022 • 5 min


There are things you don’t talk about with your colleagues - even less so with your boss. Mental health issues are certainly a big no-no. When I first started working as an agile tester, I kept my history with mental illness secret. As a result, I couldn’t speak openly about topics that are close to my heart: mental health and self-care. In the Agile World however, we value respect, courage, and openness. How do you reconcile this with these taboos?

Years of Mob Programming - tips and tricks

Oct 19, 2022 • 3 min


Mob programming is when the whole development team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space and with one shared computer, screen and keyboard. I’ve been working as a software engineer in a development team where we’ve been mob programming for well over a year, every day, without exceptions. We’ve noticed an enormous boost in productivity and we really feel that we make the most use of the team’s overall brain capacity to solve problems and to ship high quality software to our users. But it’s not always that easy. We’ve learned to master this way of working the hard way, by continuously improving on our processes.

The 5-step Guideline for Managing Items of Different Sizes in Kanban

Oct 19, 2022 • 3 min


Kanban doesn’t work for us because we don’t have items of the same size” - If I had a dollar for every time I heard this statement, I could afford to take my entire family on a month-long, all-inclusive, five-star tropical vacation. And I have a large family!

Turbulence - Thinking Flow Again

Feb 11, 2022 • 8 min


Thinking about flow from some new perspectives. Find opportunities to think about flow. Talk about turbulence: how flow is both good and bad.

Accidental Architects - how HR designs software systems

Feb 11, 2022 • 3 min


Who designs the architecture of your software systems? Conway’s Law suggests that HR may be strongly shaping software architecture by deciding how teams are composed and interrelate. Do you want HR designing your software architecture?

Nine ways to fail at Cloud Native

Feb 10, 2022 • 12 min


Cloud native is the perfect recipe for innovation, adaptability and engineering excellence – when it goes right. When it’s not right, it can be a monster spaghetti, a quality headache, and frustratingly inflexible. Why so negative?

Maturity Mapping or how to tailor capability adoption to your existing culture

Feb 10, 2022 • 17 min


One of the issues with the maturity models we often use to assess teams is they are context free. They don’t take the environment into account, missing the challenges and the specific needs we have in our context. We will explore an alternative: Maturity Mapping. How can Wardley Mapping, Social Practice Theory and Cynefin be applied together to develop situational awareness and build a shared understanding of the practices you use and the unique challenges you face.