Bjorn Edwin (Liatrio)

My favorite people — I'm Bjorn. It's great to be here. The best part of my job is to interact and collaborate with all the people, much like that. My lightning talk is gonna be interactive.

Today, I'm here to ignite some action words for buzzwords that you hear in the industry. You guys ready? But I need your help. I'm gonna pause a few times — the help is you're gonna repeat the action words after me.

I'll give you a lead. The first one — the most popular: Agile, right? It's stretched beyond its recognition. There's a big industry beyond Agile, and there's a lot of certifications, and we are all floating in the ocean of transformations and trainings and whatnot. But we are missing the core fundamental principles of Agile, right?

Agility is not about just going to the sprint meetings and cramming all the work into shorter cycles. It's about focusing on flow. You have to streamline and automate your process so that you can deliver value continuously out to the market. So the action word is: focus on flow.

Are you guys ready to help me out? Yes. Repeat after me: focus on flow. (Focus on flow.) Alright, let's try it one more time: focus on flow. (Focus on flow.)

Awesome. The next one — everybody's favorite. The cure of all things: DevOps, right?

Yeah. So DevOps is held as the brilliant solution to bring development and operations together. And it's stretched beyond, in multiple directions: DevSecOps, DevTestOps, AIOps, DevOpsOps, DevDevDevOps — that's it. But true DevOps isn't about tools or CI/CD pipelines. Like Gene mentioned, it's fundamentally about collaboration. The success of DevOps stands in bringing the team together and having them work seamlessly — actively break down the silos and ultimately deliver value to the customers. So the action word to move out of the DevOps buzzword is: collaboration.

Can you repeat after me? Collaboration. (Collaboration.) That's great. Now everybody turn around to your neighbor — give a high five, fist bump, or a handshake. You guys are doing great. Let's do this.

Awesome. Next one — the new shiny thing in the market: platform engineering. It is to create a great platform that's going to make everything easy for developers and engineers. But at the end of the day, it has just created another layer of complexity, right? So the true value of platform engineering lies in providing a self-service capability out to the customers and engineers so that they can focus on delivering value and not on bottlenecks and wait times. So the action word to get rid of the platform engineering buzzword is: self-service.

Let's do this — repeat after me: self-service. (Self-service.)

There you go. The next one — the most controversial one: SAFe. It's a mini world on its own. It is out of the big Agile world. It's its own industry; it has its own roles. The best part is the certifications — the golden ticket for transformation. Or that's what someone would have you believe.

But, the long way of saying it: it should be short-lived. It is a great tool to use to transition away from a very legacy waterfall model into agile. But once you transition over, once you've embraced a lean-agile mindset, and then you have empowered teams, you just have to move away. So in this context, the action word for SAFe is: short-lived.

Can you repeat after me? Short-lived. (Short-lived.)

Excellent. The last one — have you been into any AI talks today? Guess not, right? This is real. This is in front of us. This is happening. It's a boardroom topic. Everybody's actively focusing on AI. There's no product and capability out there that's not gonna have AI in the future. But we are all trying to figure this out together, right?

So we should embrace a mindset of experimentation. This includes learning and iterating over the AI models, so you can figure out what you are gonna solve with these AI models for your specific needs and purposes. So the action word to get rid of the buzzword AI is: experimentation. Can you repeat after me? Experimentation. (Experimentation.)

Excellent. Now let's all kill all these buzzwords — Agile, DevOps, platform engineering, SAFe, and artificial intelligence. Let's repeat one at a time:

- Focus on flow. (Focus on flow.) - Collaboration. (Collaboration.) - Self-service. (Self-service.) - Short-lived. (Short-lived.) - Experimentation. (Experimentation.)

That's me. Thank you very much.