Why do some products, digital or analog, capture our imagination while others never make it past the prototype stage? In this dynamic talk, Renegade Game Studios consultant Thomas Haver pulls back the curtain on the product development secrets hidden in the world of modern board games.

 

From revitalizing classic franchises to building brand new titles from scratch, he shows how the same principles that drive compelling gameplay also drive successful technology products. Grounded in the IIBA BABOK® and real world case studies, this session offers practical and repeatable strategies for discovery, iteration, stakeholder alignment, and creating experiences users actually love.

Attendees will walk away with a fresh, cross industry perspective: no matter your role, your domain, or your company's level of maturity, good product development plays by the same rules.

If you are ready to level up your approach to product development and see your craft through an entirely new lens, this is your next must attend session. 

 

Thomas is presently serving as a Master Software Engineer. He leads a team of testers, ops engineers, and production support analysts in the adoption of DevOps practices. Previously, he led the enterprise automation support of 73 applications at Huntington National Bank that encompassed testing, metrics & reporting, and data management. Thomas has a background in Physics & Biophysics, with over a decade spent in research science studying fluorescence spectroscopy and microscopy before joining IT.

Strategic Agile Transformation Lead: Energizing Enterprises, Driving Efficiency, and Promoting Business Excellence

Backlog refinement is essential to successful delivery—yet many teams struggle with sessions that either lack structure or get bogged down in detail, leading to misalignment, missed dependencies, and costly rework. AI offers new opportunities to accelerate preparation by surfacing dependencies, suggesting acceptance criteria, and highlighting gaps. But efficiency alone isn’t the goal—refinement is ultimately about conversations that build shared understanding and alignment.
If AI can speed up the preparation, how do we ensure the conversations that truly matter don’t get lost along the way?

This session explores how AI can augment, not replace, those conversations. Attendees will learn how to blend AI-generated insights with facilitation techniques that keep refinement human-centered, collaborative, and focused on outcomes.

Learning Objectives:
Discover where AI adds value in backlog refinement without replacing dialogue.
Learn techniques to integrate AI insights into collaborative team conversations.
Recognize the limits of automation and the importance of human judgment.
Explore practical ways to improve clarity, alignment, and speed in refinement sessions.

Vandana Rajagopal is an Agile Coach supporting clients from various industries. From her multi-faceted experience in healthcare and IT, she has been involved in implementing Agile and developing a product centric approach in healthcare, insurance, utility, and software product industries.

Vandana specializes in growing the mindset and behaviors of individuals and teams, enabling them as change agents to embrace new ways of working to deliver value-based outcomes. She is passionate about developing skill sets in teams and helping individuals grow in their core capabilities along a self-discovery path.

In an effort to giving back to the community, Vandana serves as a lead in the Women in Agile Columbus chapter. She provides opportunities for individuals to share knowledge and creates space for new voices. During her free time, she is a yoga instructor and helps create and safe and healthy community by building mindfulness in both adults and children.

 

Building a product roadmap isn’t just about plotting features on a timeline—it’s about creating clarity, alignment, and focus in the face of competing priorities. In this session, I’ll share real-life experiences using now–next–later roadmaps to connect strategy to execution. You’ll see how to move from idea to action while ensuring that goals, strategies, objectives, and measurements stay tightly aligned. Through practical examples, I’ll demonstrate how roadmaps can serve as both a communication tool and a decision-making framework, helping teams prioritize what matters most and adapt as conditions change.

Learning Objectives
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Differentiate between traditional feature-based roadmaps and outcome-driven now–next–later roadmaps.
2. Apply roadmap techniques to translate strategic goals into prioritized strategies that balance short-term needs with long-term vision.
3. Evaluate competing product opportunities using measurable objectives to guide prioritization and stakeholder alignment.

This session addresses one of the most persistent challenges in product development: connecting high‑level strategy to day‑to‑day execution. While many talks focus on backlog management or feature delivery, this session emphasizes outcome‑driven roadmapping as a leadership tool for alignment, prioritization, and measurable impact. By grounding the discussion in real‑world examples, it provides attendees with practical techniques they can immediately apply to their own organizations. Reviewers can expect this session to resonate with both product leaders and practitioners who need to balance competing priorities while keeping teams focused on delivering value.

 

In today’s organizations, influence often matters more than authority. Business analysts and product managers often hold the insights that can transform outcomes, yet can struggle to gain traction with stakeholders. This session introduces the Integral Model as a powerful lens for influence—helping you see the whole system, speak to every perspective, and design strategies that inspire alignment and action. Walk away with practical tools and a new mindset for becoming an “integral influencer” in your own organization

Learning Objectives:
1. Analyze stakeholder dynamics using the Integral Model’s four quadrants to identify gaps in influence strategies.
2. Apply the quadrant framework to real-world business analysis and product management scenarios to design more holistic approaches to stakeholder engagement.
3. Evaluate the effectiveness of past or current influence attempts by diagnosing which quadrants were emphasized or neglected.

 

With more than twenty-eight years of project delivery experience, Faye Thompson serves as a consultant coach, product manager and scrum master. With a focus on an agile mindset and continuous improvement, Faye has had a positive impact in the financial services, healthcare, advertising, marketing, automotive, retail and aviation industries. Passionate about using innovative solutions to drive business value, she trains, mentors and coaches and workgroups as they transform themselves into highly engaged and energized teams. 

Faye also enjoys serving on the board of directors for the Central Ohio Agile Association, on the Core Program Committee of the Women in Agile Launching New Voices initiative, and as President of the Women in STEMM Alumni Society of The Ohio State University. She spends her free time volunteering as an emergency medical responder and public affairs coordinator for the American Red Cross.

Kyle Jenkins is driven to help you ease the pain of work, whether it’s technology bleeding resources or trouble working with a team of people. As a full stack developer, public speaker, and principal consultant with Improving, a global software development consulting and training company, he integrates into teams to provide quality software solutions and into the IT and Agile community to improve processes and teamwork. On the side, he is an avid video gamer, and loves correlating the challenges and learnings from video games to the world of work.