Inception/Kickoff Meetings for Distributed Teams

by Jesse Fewell, Laura Richardson

A best practice for Agile teams is the inception or kickoff meeting: a chance to agree and align on priorities, establish a vision, situate the work in the context of roadmaps or longer-term initiatives, identify risks and enablers and negotiate scope before undertaking a substantial piece of work. Unfortunately, these meetings are especially challenging for large and distributed teams. Too often Product Owners simply blast PowerPoint at developers who are focused on their latest build instead of deeply engaged in exploring the problem. In this Collaboration at Scale webinar, we'll explore frameworks that distributed teams can use before and during all forms of "let's start this next release right" meetings: project kickoffs, release planning, boot camps, liftoffs, and inceptions. These frameworks will help teams stay engaged and enable them to finish better by starting well.

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Presenter(s)

Jesse Fewell

An accomplished Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, and certified collaboration instructor, Jesse Fewell has helped thousands of people at dozens of companies embrace Agile and Scrum values, improving their ability to deliver superior results through disciplined execution and thoughtful, supportive leadership. Jesse’s work focuses on the building the virtuous system that results when a better workplace leads to better business results and vice versa, helping all teams realize their full potential.

Laura Richardson

Laura is passionate about technology and about helping customers find powerful solutions to pressing problems. She brings 20 years of sales and management experience to Conteneo Inc., including seven years at Uptime Resources where she ran the IT professional services division. Her team managed all aspects of technology for small and mid-sized businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to Uptime Resources, Laura was the business development director at E-Color where she and her team launched an image and color optimization engine to improve the reliability of online images used by large e-commerce sites from companies like Bloomingdales and J Crew. The seeds for her love of technology were planted during the four years she spent with ObjectSpace. As Sales Director for both the East and then the West Coast, she helped large Fortune accounts successfully adopt object-oriented technology and iterative development practices which was very rewarding. Laura holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and has also worked on an MA in Psychology. She lives in the East Bay with her husband and two children and challenges herself a few times a year by participating in a ToughMudder Adventure Race.