This post is from Agile2025 Conference Chair Chris Murman.
If you’ve ever attended an industry conference, most of the crowd has the same thought at some point or another. Regardless of your experience or level of expertise, you scan the program and wonder. Talking to people in between sessions, the sentiment grows. It for sure comes when you scan your notes at the end of the event.
“When I get the chance to run an event, I will help make the best program ever.”
Being conference chair means you get everyone’s best pitches. They come over the phone, in texts, emails, social media, and a few in ways I didn’t think existed. These are people I call friends, colleagues, peers, acquaintances, and more. Every one of them would be a welcome addition to any program with unlimited speaking slots.
So the job is truly about setting a vision, filtering all those pitches, running them by peers on the program team, and eventually ending in the big “ta-da” of revealing it to the community. Then social media has its say. There are never enough spots, and you know you will disappoint some of those friends.
That’s the gig.
Turning stale into fresh
One common criticism of Agile conferences has been how stale the content has grown. Most have said it at one point in time:
“I mostly attend to see my friends, because I don’t get much from the sessions anymore.”
While attendees are still paying for tickets, this type of feedback isn’t ideal for conference organizers. I have a take on why that’s happened.
For years, we had a format where content would center around a few big buckets. Track chairs always put a certain spin or slant on the bucket, but for the most part they stay the same. Submitters would send their abstracts for a topic related to team, organizational, product, technical, beginners, and expert Agility. When the event was much larger in the 2010s, there would be other buckets, but for the most part, the content would belong to one of those six sections.
Not every conference buckets its content that way, but you get my drift.
A few friends challenged me this summer on the content front. When content is formatted in the same buckets, it does tend to feel repetitive after a few years. This isn’t to say that new things aren’t happening, but that’s on a personal level. We have spent the past decade polishing up ways to get better collaboration in meetings, for framework events to be facilitated in the best way possible, and for technology to be more predictable (on top of other things).
Changing the conversation
This is why we completely changed the format for submissions this year. Instead of using broad buckets to throw your learning objectives into, we created very specific problems that we feel are happening in our world today. We challenged the community to submit their best ideas to help fix the issues, and I must say the community responded very well.
We will be presenting stories about the following:
- How Agile has failed at times, and how we’ve failed Agile.
- Coaching teams that don’t want to be coached.
- Technologies that will soon change the way we work.
- How AI is revolutionizing Agile practices.
- The evolution of careers in the Agile world, and what’s next.
- What organizations are doing to become more people-centered.
- And even a hackathon focused on doing meaningful work for a local charity.
We realized that while there’s still value in many of the traditional topics, the format had become repetitive. To bring new energy and relevance to the program, we shifted our focus this year.
A more focused event
This year will be a concentrated program. With fewer than 70 speaking slots, that’s a quarter of the number of speakers selected to speak in the 2010s. We heard from the community that five days of content is no longer feasible, so we’re simplifying the program to create a more concentrated, high-impact experience.
For sessions that don’t get selected, Agile Alliance Managing Director Teresa Foster has exciting plans to keep those ideas in play—adding them to a pool of submissions that may be chosen for monthly online presentations, expanding opportunities for speakers and the community alike. There’s some really good stuff in the over 400 submissions sent in this year.
These topics were chosen with the hope that organizations would see their value and sponsor employees to learn from them. While we know in-person conferences can be a tough sell in today’s industry, we’ve curated fresh, relevant content that you can take to your boss and make the case for attending.
While the vision we have for 2025 has evolved over time, what we’re putting together now excites me. We’re making the conference more relevant, dynamic, and impactful. My guarantee is you will learn something new this year because we are building it with that intent.
Come hang out with us in Denver this summer at Agile2025!
