Program

"Scaling Product Portfolios in Agile Enterprises"

"Aligning Strategy & Execution: Building a Culture of Flow for Customer-Centricity in a Product Engineering Org"

Product Development is a creative endeavor, but it's also complex and inherently uncertain. Aligning your Product vision with execution is crucial, but often challenging In Engineering organizations, focus mostly gravitates towards speed, inadvertently underestimating the critical role of quality. This could lead to unforeseen rework, loss of brand image, and ultimately impacting value delivery.

In this session, I would talk about:

How Agility helped us in alignment of execution path with the Product's big rocks
How quality is an equally paramount cornerstone, of delivering value predictably & quicker
The Journey we undertook in the engineering organization establishing DevOps flow metrics dashboard and the change in mindset we observed.
In this journey of Kaizen, delve into not just the mechanics behind it, also the overall culture shift we observed.

"Live Engineering for powering agile transformation"

"Scaling Agile - driving transformation across enterprise teams"

Scaling Agile across large organizations requires careful coordination, teamwork, and flexibility. This session will explore common challenges like leadership resistance, misaligned goals, and teams working in silos. Using practical frameworks and real-life examples, we’ll discuss ways to address these issues and successfully scale Agile to deliver value to customers. This talk will provide clear, actionable insights for leaders looking to improve collaboration and drive Agile transformations at an enterprise level. And this I believe will resonate with lot of people as we grow in scale and complexity.

"Agile Governance in Enterprise Product Management"

"Empowering Product Leaders: Building a growth mindset in Agile Teams"

Life doesn't stop us from learning, same with the Product Ecosystem. Enterprise Product maturation and innovation needs a lot of Brainstorming compared to other types of products like consumer products.

Continuous learning will be part of every enterprise/Organisation vision. Innovation and Continuous learning is always tied back like 2 faces of a coin. Every person looks forward to both continuous learning and innovation in day-to-day personal life and professional development. Augmented thinking helps us to encourage enterprise towards innovation and continuous learning.

My Plan is to deep dive on different ways to encourage and focus on the Enterprise product team towards the topic.

I will be extensive using data and storytelling during the presentation.

"Cloud-Native Testing Strategies"

Cloud-Native testing strategies are critical to ensure the reliability and performance of applications built on microservices architecture. A comprehensive approach includes unit testing, integration testing, contract testing, and end-to-end testing. Unit testing focuses on individual components, ensuring they function as expected. Integration testing validates the interaction between different services. Contract testing, facilitated by tools like Pact, ensures that services adhere to the agreed-upon API contracts. End-to-end testing verifies the complete workflow of the application. Open source tools such as JUnit, TestNG for unit testing, WireMock for mocking APIs, and Selenium for end-to-end testing play a crucial role in these strategies. Additionally, tools like Kubernetes for container orchestration and Istio for service mesh can help in creating realistic test environments, making the testing process more robust and reliable.

Araf Karsh has over 25+ years of experience leading the design and development of mission-critical, object-oriented, and web-based applications for premier organizations, including Bank of America, CIBC, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Dept of Energy. Karsh has an established track record leading production software organizations and bringing new products to market using leading-edge technology.