How we conducted TAC 2021. Impressions, abstracts, video


Hi, I’m Evgeny Stepchenko, delivery manager of Tinkoff. In October we spent Tinkoff Agile Conference about scaling changes and changes when scaling, team development and engineering practices. It is important for us that team leaders, tech leads, managers and experts develop as a single community. Therefore, we convened a conference, invited professionals from various fields and tried to create a platform for networking. Speakers talked about management methods, metrics, technical aspects of agile development and how to make changes safer.

Six thousand spectators watched the conference online, and two hundred and fifty people were present in a new format for us – live communication. Participants actively asked questions and worked actively in workshops. They wrote in the chat how there was a lack of live events during the pandemic, took home insights, and someone even changed the idea of ​​Tinkoff for the better.

I participated in the preparation of the program of the event and helped with the organization on site. I would like to share with you the atmosphere of the conference and tell you more about several reports. At the end of the article, I will leave links to all entries and a selection of photographs.

Alexey Pimenov, trainer and consultant on the topics of Kanban Method and Business Agility, spoke about why sociology is important for a modern manager.

Why should a manager know the history of the Vikings of Greenland?

The change agent often has to face resistance. It is important to understand the reasons and how you can interact with them.

We all identify ourselves through belonging to different “tribes”: a work team, a profession, a company of football or ball hockey fans, residents of a particular city. And in many ways, this belonging determines our motivation and behavior. When we understand how external circumstances affect the safety of the individual and the tribe, we better understand the motivation of people and create stronger tribes that are resistant to external challenges.

Examples of behavior that occurs in response to events affecting individual and tribal security (IS - Individual Security, TS - Tribal Security)
Examples of behavior that occurs in response to events affecting individual and tribal security (IS – Individual Security, TS – Tribal Security)
Examples of behavior that occurs in response to events that affect individual and tribal value (IV - Individual Value, TV - Tribal Value)
Examples of behavior that occurs in response to events that affect individual and tribal value (IV – Individual Value, TV – Tribal Value)

But there is also a downside: a strong identity – belonging to teams and professional communities, a tribe with high security – can hinder the emergence of disruptive innovations, as change attacks the existing identity. Recommendations on what to do with it, see the report Alexei and read the book Ray Immelman Boss.

Anna Obukhova, Agile Coach, told where to get energy for change

Anna does not give a “pill”, but tells how to get energy for changes from the changes themselves. She draws on neuroscience, but at the same time speaks in simple and understandable language.

Looking at agile practices from a brain science perspective, complemented by specific tools such as the AGROW model, result authorization, helps to better understand ourselves and others.

Paired with information from Alexey’s talk, it turns out an excellent, albeit difficult to use, set of change agent tools.

Konstantin Shadrin, Senior Product Manager Avito, shared his experience of applying the Working Backward approach

A data-driven approach to product development is not a panacea for market success. We cannot drive only by instruments, and the Vision Driven Data Informed approach allows us to better see where we are going. But how can a Vision be formalized? You can collect many slides with data, graphs, and … make mistakes in predictions. Or go from the end point, describe the end result in the form of a press release, as if the product is already ready.

How the initial focus on the client helps to optimize resources and speed up communication processes – see Konstantin’s speech.

Alexander Suleimanov, Delivery Manager at Tinkoff, spoke about improving processes through the prism of the Kanban method and its principles

If you are not yet using the Kanban method, check out the talk. Lots of practice and no water.

After that, be sure to see “Why You Don’t Need Your Metrics” by Anastasia Medvedeva. Nastya talks about not focusing only on process metrics, and shows why with examples. In my opinion, these two performances complement each other perfectly.

And one more report from Tinkoff residents about the application of the Kanban method in practice – “We manage bottlenecks in processes” by Evgeny Smirnov about setting up basic processes in a team.

Impressions of Oksana Krechko, Delivery Manager at Tinkoff

Was interesting presentation by Alexey Savvateev, I especially liked the example with turnstiles, which showed how collective decision-making occurs. This is useful for working with large teams and for preliminary audience assessment when considering what scenarios might be, and preparing Plan A, Plan B, Plan C.

The report of Pimenov was also relevant, Zhenya analyzed it in detail. I will only add that I felt on myself everything that Lesha told about. Now I am working with the resistance in the established “tribe”.

Askhat Urazbayev’s topic close to me. I previously worked in a department where BigData was part of the team, and the message about work from the business was just realized in my team. You can say that during the lecture, I analyzed what steps I took then and how this relates to the steps of Askhat. The report will be useful to those who are currently designing teams consisting of one or related competencies. Askhat said that such teams do not capture the entire product and, ideally, you should strive to capture the entire end-to-end process. Askhat explained everything using BigData as an example. He talked about why Kanban is more applicable than Scrum in large teams and for long periods of time.

A story about DDD by Evgeny Peshkov was a new topic for me, and I found in it a connection with the practice of “make the rules explicit”, saw how it works in other areas. I have never come across DDD and was surprised that from the first point they implemented explicit rules in themselves, made standardization and the work accelerated. The balance between the lack of regulations and the large number of them is important. Evgeny clearly showed this balance by the example of the unification of names and how it accelerated the work.

Dmitry Gadar shared his constructive approach to security. He talked about the fact that security should be comfortable and friendly, but provide the necessary protection. The principle of “forbid everything” no longer works. You can work with a calculator, but with a computer it is more efficient.

Well, Anechka Obukhova was, as always, beautiful! I saw how she prepared, how she was keenly interested in the technical part: light, sound, where it is better to be on stage. The emotional charge from her during the performance was incredible, and the audience felt it! I even asked after the lecture: “You give so much, do you get energy back?” Anya replied: “Of course, yes, otherwise I would not have been doing this.”

I would like to note the general atmosphere of luminescence and positiveness and the cool solution with express testing. As for me, this is the only thing that can protect the participants of such large events.

And also people came up to me with gratitude for organizing the event. We shared our enthusiasm for topics and materials. Some even had difficulties with choosing which gym to go to, because they wanted to be in time everywhere. It was nice, the feedback is inspiring.

Instead of a conclusion

Our goal was to support the community, create reasons for professional communication and provide food for thought, stimulate networking. And the participants noted this:

The speakers touched upon the topics of energy for change, talked about how to preserve all the good while scaling, how to manage ML projects and software security, how to evolve the architecture and why technical excellence is needed.

At hands-on workshops, participants learned about delegation tools, worked with trust in a team, and conducted Event Storming to create a cat rental service. Workshops without video, because the format did not involve recording, and here it was more fortunate to participate live.

See photos from the event in the albums In contact with and Facebook, you can find yourself and mark colleagues. Speeches of all speakers are collected on our youtube channel, we have uploaded the complete playlist.

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