Linda de Roo is a dedicated Product Owner from the Netherlands with a deep background in the banking and insurance sectors, and a broad prior experience in software testing. She currently serves as Product Owner at Achmea.

A track & field enthusiast, Linda is also an avid (ultra)runner and athletics trainer.

More information about Linda can be found on her LinkedIn.

Thomas van Zuijlen is a seasoned Scrum Master and workshop facilitator operating in the Netherlands and Lithuania. A former dev and occasional quiz master, he’s proud to have been the two-time host of Agile Day Kaunas.

Thomas believes that self-organization, empiricism, and facilitation will save the world. His weekly newsletter on practical agility is called TheBacklog.cc.

More information about Thomas is on his LinkedIn.

Title of presentation: Running Uphill: 3 Practical Lessons in Collaboration from a Unique Team in a Complex SAFe Implementation.

Running Uphill is an interactive experience report by PO Linda de Roo and Scrum Master Thomas van Zuijlen.

Over the course of seven months, Linda and Thomas worked together in a unique team set up as part of a SAFe Agile Release Train within the Netherlands’ largest insurance corporation.

Their session is aimed at POs and Scrum Masters, who get to actively reflect on collaboration challenges using real-life wicked problems from Linda’s and Thomas’s teams.

Running Uphill uses those examples as the jumping-off point for stories from two perspectives, sharing doubts, losses, and wins from both sides of the Product Owner/Scrum Master sandwich.

Take-aways are presented as three concrete learnings to apply, around escalations, trust, and taking small steps toward empiricism in the unlikeliest circumstances.