One week to go for this year’s ScanDev conference in Gothenburg, and slides are done.

Topics covered are mainly:
Strategies for growing a distributed product owner team, when the problem space is very different from the normal experience world of a software developer. Strategies for communication and customer collaboration in the distributed setup.

For preparation, I made a lot of personal interviews with product owners on different hierarchy levels and multiple sites. I learned a lot about the reality behind our official agile framework, and how much the real success depends on people and their skills and goals.

To convert my knowledge into an interesting presentation I used a marvellous book, a classic: Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story by Jerry Weissman. What is very helpful in this book is that he tells you a lot of stories to make sure you know what you want to tell, to whom, and how you will bring this across to your audience. So I started to create my presentation on a lonely day at home, using hundreds of sticky notes on my personal whiteboard, instead of bothering with Outlook templates or -beware!- assistants. Then I selected a structure for the slides that would allow me to tell my story, and then I created each single slide on a sheet of paper, put them into the structure, re-ordered and finally bright them to the office.

There, of course, I had to take a corporate template, and also picked a lot of photos, that would this time nicely fit with the topic. As structure I had selected a pyramid. I created it with corporate colors, and let it build up throughout the slides.

At the beginning of this week, it was finished, and I submitted it for review and release. And -wow! -I got it released after considering a few remarks, in less than two days. I can say, the release process got much more agile since I first used it for an external presentation four years ago, when it still took me four weeks, but obviously as well my own professionalism in creating publications has increased a lot since then.