Speakers 2024 – Main Track
Peter Palmér
Senior Business Strategist at Scania
Peter Palmér has extensive experience in lean management in both production and product development, as well as experience of leadership in other cultures. With 18 years of experience within production, engineering and quality followed by 20 years in various management positions in product development Peter has many stories to tell. Since the beginning of the 1990es he has been closely involved with the Scania Way development journey both in Sweden and South America.
He is a frequent speaker at international and national conferences on the subject of LPD and leadership. Peter has been working closely with LPPDE since the organization’s start 2008 including seven years on the LPPDE board with a second period started 2023. Through LPPDE Peter has organized and chaired or co-chaired many conferences in Europe and in the US. Since the end of 2020 he runs the monthly LPPDE Virtual Summits, a four-hour learning exchange with four different speakers. He is a member of various LPD-networks and has co-developed LPD training courses with Chalmers Professional Education and The KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Talk
Lean-agile transformation
How to manage lean-agile culture change in a company that is a mature, successful and profitable organisation. What are the pros and cons of the current improvement culture when it comes to making the change to a more efficient and effective way of working? Peter shares his insights on the Scania Way journey to improve the way the company operates from the early 1990s to the present day, and looks to the future with an even stronger transformation, especially with the inclusion of all four brands of the TRATON family, MAN, Navistar, Svania and VW Truck & Bus.
Ines Garcia
Author | Agile & Climate Coach | Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame | www.inesgarcia.me
Ines helps individuals, teams, and organizations deliver better value and reduce waste (time, effort, materials, energy). Their focus is on impact, aiming to leave the place better than how they found it: Product, People, and Planet.
With over a decade of dual experience in Agile and Salesforce, Ines’ work is enhanced by practices from the Circular Economy and Biomimicry.
Ines actively contributes to scrumalliance.org, Agile Alliance (Sustainability Initiative), Pledge1%, Business Declares, Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Work on Climate & Business of Purpose communities, The Mentorship Central, and YeurLeadin.
Talk
Agile Professionals Embracing Circular Economy: Transforming Industries with Sustainable Practices
As Agile practitioners product sustainability is our responsibility. In this session we will delve from the business case for Sustainability (& debunking top excuses) right into the responsibility in shaping efficient, modular and natural-capital aware products and systems. Not just by the mantra of “less is more” (simplifying & optimizing), we’ll explore the concept of Circular Economy and how can be applied to our daily practices. Skill up for what’s on-demand and what we ought to achieve within the next 6 years: The legally binding Paris Agreement. Not long!
Paula Vesterinen
Head of Portfolio Management
Paula Vesterinen is a Strategic Portfolio Management professional and a long-term agile transformation lead.
Paula Vesterinen has worked as a change management director for Kelas agile transformation. She has defined with her team a business-driven agile development model and the necessary operating conditions for Kela. She has established the Kela-level portfolio management function and she is working currently as a head of portfolio management for Kela.
In addition to Kela Paula has a strong background in ICT capability management, line management, and IT architectures in listed global organization. Paula has a master’s degree in Information Systems Management, and she is certified in SAFe and ITIL.
Paula did her Master’s degree thesis on Lean and Agile Portfolio Management at 2015, which was recognized as the best thesis of the year at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2015121721227 www.linkedin.com/in/paulavesterinen
Talk
Agile transformation in large public organization
The continuous change in the operating environment is the norm for all organizations. The pace of this change is accelerating, and predicting it has become more challenging than before. Kela responds to these challenges by systematically developing the organization’s change capability. For several years, Kela has been enhancing its organizations change capability through agile development, goal-oriented management, coaching leadership, self- and community management, strategic foresight, and mutual agreement. This presentation summarizes the key aspects of the journey of change.
Jaakko Jokipii
Lead Agile Coach
Jaakko is a seasoned Lead Agile Coach with a wealth of experience in guiding both leadership and technical teams. Having spent five years in the financial sector, he has honed his skills extensively. Moreover, Jaakko is actively involved in nurturing one of the largest corporate coach communities, having served as a chapter lead, domain lead, and DevOps learning tower master. His expertise spans facilitation, leadership development, coaching, agile methodologies, and organizational development. Before assuming his current role at OP Financial Group, Jaakko held the position of Agile Coach at Nordea. During this time, he provided invaluable guidance to technical teams working on digital channels and authentication services. Prior to venturing into the financial realm, Jaakko spearheaded the ‘Chaos project,’ leveraging experimentation to tackle challenges within the public sector.
Talk
The three things you should know about Agile Leadership
In this talk, “The three things you should know about Agile Leadership,” you will learn valuable insights from real-life experiences and sense-making in the trenches. While the title of the talk suggests that only three things will be presented, the speaker will actually present three valuable triplets that can lead to better thinking and more value-creating and fluent work life.
The following triplets will be covered:
-How most challenges agile leaders encounter can be condensed into three sources (expectation management, communication, creating common understanding) and how that helps in navigating everyday situations
-The triplet of thinking about participatory leadership (dialogue, deliberation, and deals), which can help leaders build trust and collaboration within their teams.
-The three cornerstones of agile leadership (role modeling, testifying, and inviting), which can help leaders renew their approach towards leadership activities.
The speaker will provide real-life stories and examples to illustrate how these concepts have been applied in practice. Attendees can expect to gain valuable insights and takeaways that they can apply to their own work and leadership style.
Henna Torkkola
Agile Coach, Future Fuels and Decarbonisation, Wärtsilä Marine R&D
Henna is enthusiastic Agilist with a human-centric approach. Since 2018 she has been working as an agile coach in Engines R&D and Engineering at Wärtsilä, but before that gained experience also from banking industry. After Henna joined Wärtsilä she has been coaching several teams and leaders during their agile transformation in hardware development environment, facilitated many different agile ceremonies and at the same time increased her agile knowledge by making some research and joining in several agile related trainings & events.
Henna holds a Master of Science in Human Resource Management from University of Vaasa and Bachelor of Business Administration in Leadership and Organization Development from Metropolia University of Applied Sciences.
Henna is passionate about cultural and psychological aspects of agile and believes that the values behind the approach can be implemented in different development environments, no matter what the industry is.
Tuomas Linna
Program Manager, Wärtsilä Marine R&D
Tuomas has extensive experience from project and program management when leading very large and complex development initiatives and applying agile values, principles & methods. He is currently leading platform development of Wärtsilä Small Bore Engines. In this role, he is also in charge of ammonia engine development and industrialization. Before joining in R&D seven years ago, Tuomas was working as a project manager in customer delivery projects serving the Offshore and Special vessel segment customers in Europe, South America, and in China.
Tuomas has a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology. He is additionally holding a PMP certificate and has been involved in the project management development within Wärtsilä during the last 17 years.
Tuomas is passionate to get large teams integrated, motivated, and energized to deliver success and hitting the moving target. His motto is: “together, with joy, and a constructive way”.
Talk
Scaled Agile approach tuned for new engine development
Practical interpretation on how agile values and principles have been implemented and scaled when creating a future proof engine at Wärtsilä. During our talk we will focus on the following questions: “how to create flexibility and increase speed of hardware development?”, “how to secure manufacturability and serviceability?” and “how to ensure fast time to market with correct value proposition?” Additionally, we will also provide summary of learnings from our agile transformation journey.
Juuso Jankama
CEO, Vincit Solutions Oy (VincitEAM)
Juuso Jankama is a seasoned IT-veteran with over 20 years of diverse experience in making and enabling sustainable change, both from multinational industrial companies and IT solution vendors. His work history includes industry leaders such as Gardner Denver, Parker Hannifin, Basware, and Oracle. Currently, Juuso is the CEO of Vincit Solutions Oy, responsible for developing and growing the VincitEAM product business (www.vinciteam.fi). For Juuso agile is not only a method but a way of life. Having seen it work miracles both in physical manufacturing and software development, he has successfully utilized the same principles in leadership. Juuso’s approach as a speaker combines deep industry knowledge with practical insights, aiming to inspire without overstating
Talk
Hits and Misses – utilizing OKR as a vehicle for strategic change
In his keynote, Juuso unveils VincitEAM’s strategic evolution through the OKR framework, detailing the rationale, execution, and insights from their journey. He emphasizes the practical application of OKRs, dissecting key success factors alongside challenges encountered. Through sharing VincitEAM’s experiences, Juuso aims to inspire bold change, offering actionable advice and clear do’s and don’ts to streamline the OKR journey for others.
Elina Jolma
Organizational Coach
Elina acts as an organizational coach at Taskmill Oy, helping organizations become more agile and community-driven. She is also responsible for developing Taskmill Oy’s personnel and ways of working. Her passion lies in building learning-oriented and adaptable organizations where people thrive.
Talk
How community-driven approach can raise agility to a new level?
Being agile is 20 % about methodologies and practices, and 80 % about the culture. But how to build such a culture and organizational structures where people and agility can truly flourish? Elina’s speech is about how to build community-driven organization and how organizational wide community-driven approach can bring agility to a new level.The speech addresses what kinds of things need to be considered in transformative change and how community-drivenness and agility can support each other.
Marielle Mooijekind
Agile Coach
Marielle has focused on creating value for customers throughout her 22-year tenure at a large bank, initially in IT and later in Business. In 2012, as part of a scrum team, she initiated a backlog to help customers achieve financial fitness, adopting a more holistic approach to finances. This experience sparked her interest in value creation and sustainability, recognizing its integration into all aspects of work. Following roles as an innovation consultant, product owner, and agile coach, she completed training in Design for Sustainability and Regeneration. Marielle’s current passion is leveraging agile methodologies to accelerate sustainability efforts.
Talk
Using our agile superpowers for sustainability
Sustainability is not a report, an emission calculation or a life-cycle assessment. Sustainability is changing the unsustainable to sustainable. This is a proces that holds a movement from letting go of what has served us so well in the past decades, to a new – often still unknown – way of producing value for customers. Any agile professional has the knowledge and tools to guide, guard, and be a custodian to bringing sustainability to the heart of value delivering. If not value for our planet to stay habitable, then value for what? Agile coaches know how to hold space, allow groups to move through difficulty, and work with emergence. This workshop weaves together a systemic exercise to stay in the unknown, and work with the limbic system that creates tension and stress in this potent space. The workshop then moves into working with stuckness and embodiment. And the final part is how to use visual management to let go, move forward, and truthfully stand in the pains and gains for our beautiful home planet.
The key takeaways of this workshop are
– A floor exercise for going through transformation
– Embodying stuck-ness to explore possibilities
– Getting comfortable that sustainability is not only new business and innovation, it is speeding up sunsetting the old, and hospicing the non-sustainable.
Terhi Aho
AI Transformation Advisor & Coach
Terhi is a pioneer in digital growth and agile development. She is an experienced business coach whose goal-oriented and results-driven approach enables quick tangible results and sustainable growth. Terhi has a Diploma in AI Coaching and she uses AI tools to bring new depth and insight to her clients’ change processes. She works as an AI Transformation Advisor at Gofore. She helps organisations to harness the power of digitalisation and navigate the possibilities of AI transformation.
She is the author of the book Culture of Experimentation – Leading Growth Every Day (in Finnish) The book provides practical case studies and shows how continuous innovation and a culture of experimentation can lay the foundation for business growth. Terhi’s experience in a wide range of industries makes her a versatile expert on the possibilities of the digital age
Katariina Kovanen-Piippo
Management Consultant & Business Coach
Katariina Kovanen-Piippo is a skilled professional in change management and digital development, mastering the art of design and strategic implementation. Holding credentials as a Certified Business Coach, M.Sc, and an MBA in Economics, her comprehensive background spans across finance, ICT, e-commerce, and the public sector. Katariina has a Diploma in AI Coaching and she combines AI with traditional business coaching techniques, which makes her a pioneer in the field. This specialization allows her to enhance the coaching experience with AI-driven insights, and provide her clients creative solutions and a profound understanding of their challenges. She works at Gofore as a management consultant and senior service designer, where she guides organizations towards achieving tangible, human-centered changes and growth in digital, establishing herself as a multifaceted expert and a forward-thinking professional.
Talk
Experimental and coaching innovator
The workshop is about how to use agile experimentation to renew yourself as a leader and improve your team’s performance. We will proceed with short introductions and exercises. You will see in practice how even in a short time you can get tangible results. You will learn to use new tools that foster a coaching mindset and a culture of experimentation. You will also create a concrete plan for your own experiment and get an idea how to get boosted with AI tools. By the end of the workshop, you will be ready to apply what you learned to your own leadership challenges. The workshop is likely to change your thinking and you will begin to see experimental possibilities in areas that previously seemed impossible.
Andrea Darabos
Business Agility Consultant, Innovation Catalyst
Andrea is a business transformation catalyst, with over a decade of experience working with business agility, rapid product development and innovation. Her clients include global banks like HSBC, NatWest, Marks and Spencer Bank, telcos – Ericsson and Vodafone – and alike. Originally a software developer, Andrea has experience of working as part of large people networks and cross-functional teams dotted around continents. Through her work, she discovered that imposing a fixed agile process can be limiting what is possible… Andrea is committed to helping leaders create more autonomous, inviting and participatory environments! In her free time, Andrea loves spending active time – jogging, cycling, swimming in Swiss lakes and visiting art galleries.
Talk
Exploring Effective Collaboration in the 21st Century
Networked collaborator – top 5 behaviors to master for the decentralised age Talk description: With the rate of change accelerating in our external world, our organisations can only keep up, if we are willing to let go of centralized management control as a default and look into distributed, transparent governance alternatives. In order to accelerate our innovation capabilities as a business unit / organisation, we need to be able to dynamically choose our collaboration structures depending on what the situation requires. In this talk, we will share some concrete challenges and examples from organisational case studies. We will examine: What are successful individual behaviors to practice in order to become a key contributor in our organisations quest to create value? What are collective collaboration patterns we should nurture to discover and to deliver on business opportunities?
Marko Klemetti
CTO, Eficode
Marko Klemetti is the CTO of Eficode. He advises organizations on their path to becoming modern and software-driven. Marko is a passionate programmer, working mostly on emerging technologies that have the potential to become mainstream in the future. Besides, he is a founder and advisor in many tech startups.
Marko is an active speaker, and you can find him not only on Eficode’s podcasts and webinars, but also on conferences like The DevOps Conference, GOTO Copenhagen and Gene Kim’s Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit.
Talk
How AI & DevOps Have Changed the Way We Create Products (including a hands-on demo)
This talk is a combination of a hands-on demo and explaining how to approach modern AI-powered DevOps.
Ramya Sriram
Interim PO of Agile Core Team | IT Quality Assurance Manager
Ramya Sriram loves to challenge herself and embrace every opportunity life offers. She has been living in Espoo for 12 years with her husband and their two lively sons who fill their days with joy and affection. Her professional passion is Continuous Improvement, and she works at Konecranes, where she has explored various aspects of this field for 2 years. Currently, she serves as IT Quality Assurance Manager, Interim Product Owner, and Scrum Master for the Agile Core Team or Lean Agile Center of Excellence. With more than 18 years of experience in Quality, she always advocates for “Fail first and learn, building it right.”
Beyond the office walls, Ramya can often be found on the badminton court, staying active and letting off steam. When not chasing shuttlecocks or cycling, she indulges in her creative side through doodling and capturing life’s moments through photography. Her passion extends to giving back to the community, which led her to found Indian Women in Finland Ry, a community that aims to uplift and empower women who call Finland home. An adrenaline junkie at heart, she loves traveling and considers herself adventurous, enjoying activities like trekking, bungee jumping, skydiving, and rowing 30 kilometers in Sulkava despite not knowing how to swim.
Ramya adores her current role, where she networks and works closely with people. Finding the perfect work-life balance was a major reason for her move to Finland, and she is grateful to have found it in a company that prioritizes psychological safety and personal growth. A firm believer in continuous learning, she is always hungry for new knowledge and experiences to fuel both her personal and professional growth.
Talk
Finding the Flow
I would like to emphasize the importance of Continuous Improvement Mindset, the tools and methods that could be used to achieve this. In today’s rapidly evolving, businesses and market trends, individuals and teams must embrace a continuous improvement and continuous learning mindset to stay competitive and relevant. My talk delves into the significance of fostering a culture of ongoing growth and adaptation. From small adjustments to major transformations, attendees will think and understand the principles and benefits of continuous improvement. It paves the way to the need of Innovation and Planning and its significance. My Talk explains how can tools like flow metrics or maturity assessments can support this, offering insights into their applications and effectiveness. I believe this will also activate the audience for a good discussion related to how they can implement continuous improvement in their personal and professional lives, fostering innovation, efficiency, and resilience. I believe it would unlock the potential of continuous improvement and pave the way for sustained success in an ever-changing landscape.
Virpi Rowe
CEO WikiAgile
Virpi is a seasoned expert in organizational development, guiding businesses through impactful change journeys. With a career that spans over 18 years at Nokia, she navigated through various roles—from software engineering to project and program management, and from product management to portfolio management and sales. Her expertise in scaling agility became her superpower, and for the past 15 years, she has been instrumental in helping organizations build the right product and build it right. As a longstanding active member of Agile Finland Ry, Virpi has shared her insights at numerous conferences, webinars, and meetups. She is a respected trainer, having equipped over 1500 individuals with agile methodologies. Currently serving as a partner and CEO at WikiAgile, Virpi is dedicated to exploring innovative ways to help organizations create a better tomorrow.
Talk
MobAI: Transforming business with collaborative AI
Join us for an interactive workshop on MobAI, an innovative approach to integrate collaborative AI in businesses. In this 1-hour session, you’ll experience firsthand how MobAI empowers teams to leverage AI tools effectively. Through hands-on exercises and discussions, you’ll get a taste of MobAI’s potential to transform your organization’s workflow. Whether you’re new to AI or seeking to enhance your practices, this workshop offers a practical introduction to MobAI and its benefits. Discover how MobAI can kickstart your journey to harnessing the power of AI in your business operations. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore MobAI in action!
Mikko Aro
Director, Product Management and Strategy. KONE Technology and Innovation
Mikko Aro is an accomplished leader in digital product development, strategy, and transformation. With extensive experience across industrial and consumer sectors, he has spearheaded the development of numerous innovative digital products and services. His leadership in driving digital transformations within industrial companies has been pivotal, leading to the adoption of agile methodologies, ways of working and significant business growth and customer value outcomes.
Talk
CS: How to align the organisation for outcomes and performance
The presentation will focus on the transformative journey of an industrial company as it shifted from a traditional feature-led approach to a dynamic, outcome and KPI-driven model in digital service development. This talk will delve into the changes the company made to prioritize agile methodologies, emphasizing end-to-end (E2E) team ownership and empowerment. Discover how these strategic shifts not only enhanced operational efficiency but also significantly improved customer value outcomes. Speaker will share insights and strategies on successfully navigating the challenges of digital transformation in the industrial sector, illustrating how a focus on customer-centricity can lead to sustained success.