It started in May, when we thought about inviting J.B. Rainsberger to HolidayCheck. Yeah, there was some bias from my side, since I had the pleasure to have learned from him a couple years ago. So I was all in. I just had to convince my colleagues and the company to pay for it. Eventually it went quite smooth. HolidayCheck is truly committed to improve continuously.
7:26min
You have never heard of “7 minutes 26 seconds”? Now you did! It is a short and inspiring lightning talk by J.B. called “7 minutes, 26 seconds, and the Fundamental Theorem of Agile Software Development”. Here, at HolidayCheck, people refer to it as the “Accidental Complication“ talk. Over the last year, it inspired many people here to be as excited about having J.B. around as I am.
Even though I had thought of it like that before, It’s worth mentioning that this event won’t be a pure TDD session, or a programmers-only workshop. Melanie, who is one of our product owners, jumped in early to help to make #jbhc17 happen. And it became clear right away that this will not only be about teaching us developers, but also product people about tools and practices that help to deliver value as fast as possible to our Urlaubers (it’s how we call our users).
Remove bottlenecks
Titling our event “Move the bottleneck out of product development” should make it very clear that our goal is to lead the market. Once we have no bottlenecks in product development, once we deliver the best poduct for our Urlauber, once we run at high speed, once we have no useless friction slowing us down – Only then will we lead the market. We will deliver the best value, and we will have even more fun, we will be the most Urlauber-friendly company in the world, and we will find the bottlenecks in the market, not only in our company. We will be able to try new business models, we will innovate, build, measure and learn at much higher speed. That is why we invited J.B. to learn from him where we can improve in those areas.
How?
On Monday we will start with a keynote, have a nice lunch and will then be able to pick the right first bottleneck per team and practice the tools to fix it. J.B. will be leading us and be available to help, teaching and practicing with us. On Tuesday we will do a full-day workshop, continue applying the learnings and get a deeper insight on “Value-Driven Product Development”.
Would you like to do it as well?
It is an awesome thing to take part in such an event, I am quite excited. And it is cool to learn those things on the job. And so can you, by being part of HolidayCheck. Want to apply?