Impressions from Hands-on Agile 2025

Pretty alive for a dead topic

Hands-on Agile 2025 was an inspiring and energizing online event that defied the declaration that "Agile" would be dead.

Agile as a topic and the Agile community have been called dead several times. Last year was only the latest wave.

What better way to prove the critics wrong than to organize some useful and meaningful? And who would be better suited to organize such an event than Stefan Wolpers? The author of the excellent book "The Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide" regularly brings together people caring about Product and agility and got already appreciated earlier in this blog.

Between the 4th and 6th of February, about 800 people attended. I only made it to a couple of sessions, even missing all of the peer sessions proposed by participants themselves. (They all sounded very good - I was in the prep call for them.)

• Sandrine Olivencia: Back to the Source: Restoring Agility through Lean Craftsmanship

• Q & A with Petra Wille; Petra is an independent product leadership coach, book author, and Product at Heart conference organizer.

• Fabrice Bernhard: The Lean Tech Manifesto

• Linn Kelley: Change Questions: The Keys to Implementing Organizational Change that Sustains

• Peter Merel: The Agile Way

What I experienced was enough to excite me and reignite the agile fire. Some speakers were going "back to the roots" to move forward, focusing on principles and how they could be translated into and applied in the here and today. Lean was surprisingly strongly featured. Product and Organizational Change, especially what works and what doesn't, were two obvious topics and well served. And finally, a way to combine Lao Tse and The Big Lebowski with agility - who could have asked for more?

Compared to previous Hands-on Agile Meetups, there was an overlap of speakers and topics, as can be seen looking at Hands-on Agile's Youtube channel. What made the event special for me was the ability to ask questions live. It felt like the perfect moment in time for my own learning journey.

Videos of the sessions are planned to be published somewhere in March. The slide decks have already been shared.

Great stuff, Stefan and the Agile community! Thanks for the fruitful exchange.

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