Here are my thoughts and observations from the Building Business Capability 2023 (BBC 2023) conference in Las Vegas, NV May 8 – 12.
Included on this page is info from the presentation I gave as well as highlights from conversations I had during the course of the conference.
My Session
Here’s a link to the info I pulled together for my session on Wednesday. Aside from a small A/V snafu, I think the session went well. Follow the link to get a copy of the presentation and the handout I provided as well as some related articles.
BBC is the official conference of the International Association of Business Analysis (IIBA) so it inherently focuses on content of interest to business analysts.
When I put this session together I assumed that the content would appeal to a subset of the attendees – those who want to move their careers in more of a product direction or work at a company in the midst of a product transformation.
That also inherently means that the content would not be of interest to other attendees, most likely a majority.
I confirmed that my assumptions are correct.
Some of the the attendees are just starting their business analysis careers. There are others whose organizations are just launching into agile transformations (while most companies undergoing a product transformation have already adopted agile).
User Research
Given that wide variety of interests, I realized if I wanted to get a handle on what people are interested in learning more about, the best way to find out is to ask them.
To make that research as effective as possible, I used a framework that featured prevalently in my presentation to frame my research.
I provided handouts with the framework and asked the attendees to indicate the topics they were most interested in learning about.
Here are the top five topic areas:
- Product Roadmap
- Product Vision
- Feature Prioritization
- Opportunity Discovery
- Innovation
Let me know if you’d like to know the full set of results.
Since I consider this a representative sample of my target readership, I plan to use this information as feedback to guide my content decisions over the upcoming months.
Stuff From Others
It’s good to get back to in person conferences and getting the chance to re connect with people I know and meet new people. This is something that you just can’t do as easily in virtual conferences.
Following are some links to content by people I chatted with during the conference. I encourage you to check them out.
Personal Retrospectives
Christina Lovelock in person presented a session at BBC on personal retrospectives. Here’s an article she wrote about the same topic.
I’ve found personal retrospectives to be very helpful and shared my approach to them a couple of years ago.
The Rock Crusher
At the conference Shane Hastie and Steve Adolph celebrated the official launch of their book that they wrote along with Ryland Layton: The Rock Crusher: A Model for Flow-Based Backlog Management. (Affiliate Link)
If you were looking for some in depth, practical advice on backlog management, this is a good place to start.
BA Digest
I had the opportunity to catch up with Adrian ReedEditor In Chief of BA Digest – a quarterly newsletter chock full of great content for Business Analysts.
One of the pleasant surprises from the conference indirectly involves Adrian.
One morning at breakfast, Grant Wright came over and mentioned that he had a sketch note from a webinar Business Analysis in an Agile Context I did with Adrian a couple of years ago.
I’m a huge fan of Grant’s Sketch notes, and it’s a great thrill to have a sketch note for one of my sessions.