The Agile Austin conference was held on March 21 in Austin Texas. It's been held since 2012 - so this was the third annual conference.
I'd submitted a couple of talks and was lucky enough to be selected to present. Most of the presenters were from the local area and Texas, but a few "out of town" folks participated. Since this was my first Agile Austin conference, I didn't really know what to expect.
Well, it was a blast. 500 raging agilistas showed up. They apparently sold out the event with about 100 on the waiting list. Imagine that? I was talking to one of the organizers and he said people in his company were asking him to "get them in" and he had to turn them down.
They selected my Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders talk for the conference - in an 80 minute slot. This workshop is designed for a 1/2 day or full day format, but I can deliver a subset of it in as little as 90 minutes. So they put some compression pressure on me.
My session was packed. Perhaps 150 folks or so. But more important than the numbers, was the level of engagement. There was high energy and a lot of collaboration in the room.
I just heard back from the conference committee and I'm proud of the fact that my session was rated as the #1 session at the conference. How cool is that? They measured the talks by Net Promoter Score and my score was 89.61.
Now I'm not into comparative scoring, but what I'm excited about is delivering value to the customer at the conference. I'm glad folks found value in the session and I hope I inspired some changes to everyone's leadership style and approaches. It matters so much in agile teams to have great leaders around.
You can view the topics and download the presentations from the conference here.
With luck, I might go back again to Austin and present again. Next time I'll reserve more time for "tourist mode".
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.