Session Title

The Agile Generation Gap

Abstract

This will be a fun look at the generation gap in Agile Practices and how today they’re used vs how they were used in the 1990’s/Early 2000’s. We’ll also discuss how AI might play a role in coaching product development teams.

Agile Practices have certainly evolved and changed over the years, but so have the people using them. From the early days of developers just trying to find better ways to develop and test code to meet the increasing demands leading to dotcom, to the more people-centric, post-COVID ways that we see today. There are many factors affecting organization’s chances for successfully adopting new practices; often one of the more common challenges is the generational gap between senior management and younger employees. We’ll examine a model for gaining a better understanding of perspectives and look to where we might be headed in the not-too-distant future.

In this session, we will explore different perspectives from one of the earliest adopters of Scrum, Dr. Bob Schatz, and his son, Derek, who grew up seeing Scrum and then became an Agile Coach. Two generations, father, and son, providing two very different perspectives of what it takes to achieve success with agile practices.

Bio

Derek Schatz is an Agile Coach who specializes in helping product development organizations effectively apply agile practices in a pragmatic, common sense approach. Derek focuses on improving transparency, communication, empowerment, and continuous improvement guiding teams deliver great products that their customers will love. He is a Certified Scrum Professional Scrum Master (CSP-SM), holds the PMI-ACP certification, ICAgile Certified Professional in Coaching and Team Facilitation, Certified SAFe Advanced Scrum Master, and is a Certified Organizational Coach from University of Pennsylvania.

Derek has more than 8 years of experience as an Agile Coach, Scrum Master, and Quality Assurance Engineer. He has coached teams and executives to successfully deliver innovative new products in a highly complex environments. He is currently engaged with International SOS helping the teams and organizations drive value to their global client base. Prior to this Derek worked at Comcast in Philadelphia. In his time with Comcast, he saw his group’s product grow from 800K to over 2M customers. Derek worked with multiple teams at Xfinity Mobile and led a Continuous Improvement Group to identify and resolve impediments across the engineering organization. He also organized and led an Agile Center of Excellence that generated participation from Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Engineers across all of Comcast. Prior to Comcast, Derek worked for Sungard Availability Services where he was a Quality Assurance Engineer, and a Scrum Master, on a Disaster Recovery SaaS product. Derek has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from West Chester University, an MBA from Philadelphia University, and is currently pursuing his Masters of Science in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Derek has deep knowledge across various Agile Frameworks including Scrum, Kanban, Lean, SAFe, Scrum@Scale and LeSS. He is driven by the mission to help organizations successfully apply Agile practices to enable them to serve their customers in the best possible way and create a vibrant learning culture for the great people in the organization. His experience in leadership and teamwork enables him to drive effective change throughout the organization. He is a natural people leader who will raise the level of any organization, creating the discipline, adaptability, and professionalism to improve how they develop and deliver products.