Do Managers Have a Place in Agile? Rethinking Leadership Roles
Agile frameworks focus on Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Delivery Teams. However, the manager's role is often left undefined. The result is a widespread lack of clarity: managers unsure of their place, executives with misaligned expectations, and teams caught in the middle.
Ron Lichty, co-author of the book 'Managing the Unmanageable', delves into one of the most overlooked gaps in Agile adoption: the evolving role of the manager.
In this talk, Ron shares insights, anecdotes, and personal stories from decades of helping organizations make software development “hum.” He reveals what happens when Agile frameworks skip past the manager’s role, leaving a vacuum for those outside the Scrum team but still critical to team success.
Ron Lichty's Bio
Ron Lichty has been managing software development for over 35 years, in one company after another untangling its software development knots and transforming chaos to clarity, the last 25 of those in the era of Agile. Originally a programmer, he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books before being hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management roles. At companies like Fujitsu, Schwab, Razorfish, Stanford, and dozens of startups of all sizes, he grew to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.
For the last 13 years principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting (www.RonLichty.com), he trains teams and executives in agile, coaches business and product and engineering leaders, and on occasion takes on interim VP engineering roles, all in pursuit of making software development “hum." In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the periodic Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Addison Wesley recently released the 2nd edition of his fifth book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. He lives in both San Francisco and Seattle, and has co-chaired the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community, the Enterprise Agile Global Community, and the Managing Software Teams in Seattle meetup.
Agenda
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6:00pm: Welcome
- 6:15-7:15pm: Featured Speaker
- 7:15 -7:30pm: Questions & Wrap-up