Conference Report #

In October 2022 I attended the Agile Austria Conference in Graz for the first time. The conference motto was:

Destination Agile: Ist Agilität das Ziel oder der Weg?

The theme focused a lot on transformation, uncertainty, leadership, and how companies adapt to change in difficult times. Especially after the pandemic years, many talks reflected on how organizations changed and what “being agile” even means today.

Overall, the conference was interesting, although I sometimes had mixed feelings about the agile community itself. Many talks focused heavily on frameworks, structures, and processes. At times it felt like people forgot the original idea behind agile software development. Still, there were many good discussions and several talks that stayed with me after the event.

Day 1 #

Parkinson’s Law Revisited #

One of the first talks revisited Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

The speaker talked about timeboxing versus large open-ended todo lists. The idea was that strict time limits can reduce over-engineering and “gold plating”.

Another interesting point was communication inside teams. There was a reference to Alistair Cockburn and the idea that even small barriers between people reduce communication quality. The talk also discussed how remote work and home office setups can negatively affect communication dynamics.

One point I found especially interesting was the observation that stronger commitment often leads to more estimation and planning effort, which can ironically slow teams down.

Useful OKRs at willhaben #

The session from willhaben focused on practical OKRs inside a larger organization.

One funny observation was that nowadays many people seem to call themselves “Agile Coach” instead of Scrum Master.

The company shared that they use around 40 company health metrics and that all OKRs are visible to everyone internally. Transparency seemed to be an important part of their approach.

A major topic was how difficult it is to write good OKRs in the beginning. Teams need practice to move from output-focused goals toward outcome-focused goals.

The speakers also showed examples of “crutches” people often use when writing OKRs, for example:

• Baseline crutches
• Subdomain crutches

I liked that the presentation focused less on theory and more on practical mistakes organizations make.

Business vs IT #

This talk focused on the relationship between business departments and engineering teams.

One key message was:

Think in problems, not in solutions.

The speaker showed examples of old-style requirement documents and how companies historically worked with detailed specifications long before implementation started.

The presentation argued that product teams should focus more on understanding the actual business problem instead of immediately discussing technical solutions.

Agile Transformation #

This was one of the more “classic agile” talks of the conference and covered organizational transformation topics.

Some recurring themes were:

• Stability vs change
• Alignment vs autonomy
• Top-down vs bottom-up transformation
• Planning vs experimentation

The speaker mentioned that social structures inside companies are naturally resistant to change. Another interesting point was that first movers inside organizations often get punished by existing structures when trying new approaches.

There was also discussion about leadership. One quote I wrote down was roughly:

Management and leadership always go hand in hand.

The overall style of the speaker reminded me a bit of Austrian politician Werner Kogler, which made the talk unintentionally entertaining.

Closing Keynote by Linda Rising #

The closing keynote from Linda Rising was probably the talk I remember most vividly from the entire conference.

Instead of focusing on frameworks or scaling models, the keynote looked at nature, forests, and human systems.

One major topic was the “wood wide web” — the underground communication network between trees and fungi. Linda Rising referenced the book Finding the Mother Tree and connected these natural systems to collaboration and resilience in organizations.

She also mentioned studies where hospital patients recovered faster when they could see trees and nature from their windows.

Compared to many process-heavy agile talks, this keynote felt refreshingly human and philosophical.

Day 2 #

Jürgen Appelo and the unFIX Model #

The keynote from :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0} introduced the unFIX model for organizational design.

The central idea was that companies should be structured in a way that allows continuous change instead of rigid stability.

One topic was the idea of different “crew” types inside organizations:

• Value stream crews
• Capability crews
• Partnership crews
• Experience crews

The talk also discussed team sizes and how smaller teams often work better, especially in remote settings.

An important statement was that managers should primarily manage the system, not directly control teams.

I also liked the phrase:

Patterns are an option list, not a shopping list.

The presentation included examples from companies with very different organizational models, ranging from stable long-term teams to highly dynamic structures.

Even though many agile talks can become overly abstract, this keynote had several practical ideas worth thinking about.

Agile DNA #

This session focused more on organizational culture and what makes agile organizations function over longer periods of time.

Compared to other talks, this one was more conceptual and less memorable for me personally, although it connected well with the broader conference theme around transformation and adaptability.

Setting Up Agile Organizations #

This talk focused on concrete organizational structures and governance models.

One particularly memorable point was a company where salaries could theoretically be chosen freely by employees and were later sanity-checked using spreadsheets and internal benchmarks.

The session also discussed organizational transparency and decentralized decision making.

Agile in Hardware Development #

This was one of the more interesting “side topics” of the conference because it explored agile methods outside classical software development.

The talk discussed how hardware development can become more flexible through approaches like:

• Digital twins
• Model-based systems engineering

It was interesting to see agile principles applied to industries where iteration cycles are naturally slower and physical constraints play a larger role.

Final Thoughts #

This was my first agile conference and overall I enjoyed the experience.

The conference reflected an interesting contradiction inside the agile community. Agile originally started as a reaction against heavyweight processes, but many modern agile discussions seem heavily focused on frameworks, structures, certifications, and organizational mechanics.

At the same time, there were still many valuable discussions about communication, leadership, organizational design, and human collaboration.

The talks I enjoyed most were usually the ones slightly outside the “standard agile playbook”. Linda Rising’s keynote about forests and interconnected systems was a great example of that.

Would I attend again? Probably yes.