Upcoming Talks

• Beyond Agile Meetup - March 27, 2019 - Seattle, WA, United States
• DrupalCon - April 11, 2019 - Seattle, WA, United States
• Agile Israel - May 21, 2019 - Rishon LeTsiyon, Israel

Book Me

For information about having me speak at your event, please see this.

Current Talks

• Using Agile Techniques to Build a More Inclusive Team
  Building psychological safety in your teams is critical if you want them to perform at their best. The challenge is how to develop and encourage the trust and collaboration and to make sure that all voices are heard. The agile community has developed facilitation exercises and tools that make conversations more democratic and inclusive. I have used some of these techniques with my teams for years and have found them incredibly valuable. I will teach you some of the agile methods that I use for large and small team meetings, brainstorms, and one-on-ones that encourage all team members to participate. These tools also help make sure that all voices are respected and valued.
• Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement in Your Company
  Avvo created tools to encourage data-driven thinking, autonomy and a spirit of continuous improvement. This talk describes those tools, their implementation and the issues and challenges encountered when doing large-scale culture change in a ten-year-old company.
• Fail Fast, Fail Smart... Succeed!
  A talk on why failure is important in innovation and tips on how to create en environment where the effects of failure are minimized while maximizing the learning.
• Distributed Teams
  What makes distributed teams especially challenging? How can we address these challenges to make our distributed organizations more effective? In this talk, Kevin Goldsmith discusses four main challenges: Conway's Law, Amdahl's Law (as applied to organizations), Empathy, and Communication. He gives examples of these problems and solutions from his experience leading distributed teams over the last 25 years.
• Finding the right ingredients for the perfect team
  A great team is a like a great dish, balanced flavors, tastes, textures and smells combine to create something unique and delicious. I've made the mistakes of trying to build unbalanced teams either with poor distributions of experience, bad combinations of temperament, clashing skill sets or lack of diversity. I'll share those mistakes. I'll also share some of the things I did right (either intentionally or unintentionally) to create the teams that have worked very well. I'll provide some things to look out and consider for as you build a team or just expand the one you have.

Older Talks

• 2018
  • Architecture and Organization
  • What Does Good Agile Look Like?
  • Scaling Up
  • Build a fail-safe autonomous team culture to drive innovation and agility
• 2017
  • Moving forward under weaker US net neutrality rules
  • What is Agile?
  • A Software Career
  • Agile Business Transformation: Using Operational Excellence Tools & Methodologies
• 2016
  • Organization, Architecture, Autonomy and Accountability
  • How Spotify builds products
  • The Spotify Tribe
  • Innovation, Autonomy and Accountability
• 2015
  • Microservices @ Spotify
  • Autonomy For the Win: How Spotify Builds Product Balancing Alignment with Autonomy
  • Innovation and Organization
  • Apportioning Monoliths
  • Culture Leads, Everything Else Follows
• 2014
  • Building Lean
  • Building a Strong Engineering Culture
  • Empowering Your Engineering Talent
  • Focus on How You Build, Not Just on What You Build
• 2013
  • Building with Lean and Agile in the Real World
  • It Is All About the Benjamins: The Real World Economics of HPC
  • Building Revel For Nine Platforms
  • Adobe Revel and the Blissful Chaos of High Velocity, Low Process
• 2011
  • Pixel Bender
• 2010
  • GPGPU in Commercial Software: Lessons From Three Cycles of the Adobe Creative Suite
• 2008
  • The (near) Future of Personal Computers
• 2007
  • Image and Video Processing Using Adobe Image Foundation's Toolkit For Flash
• 2006
  • Blogging Technologies History
• 1995
  • Building V-Chat environments

Panels

• Speaker's Panel, Agile by Example, October 24, 2018
• A Transformation leaders panel: Spearhead your transformation from people, technology and process perspectives, OPEX Week Summer 2018, August 27, 2018
• Hiring Partner Panel, Apprenti Forum: Creating Pathways to Economic Mobility via Registered Tech Apprenticeship, March 28, 2018
• The FCC's Dismantling of Net Neutrality, The FCC's Dismantling of Net Neutrality - Law Seminars International Webcast Panel, December 20, 2017
• Tech And... The New Workforce, General Assembly talk series, November 15, 2017
• Tech Apprenticeship: The Solution for Diversity and Talent Gaps, Tech Inclusion, October 18, 2017
• David vs. Goliath (Competing for Top Engineers Against Seattle Giants), Seattle Startup Week, October 02, 2017
• Hiring Company Panel, Apprenti: Tech Apprenticeship Summit, July 11, 2017
• Parallelism, the Cloud, and the Tools of the Future for the next generation of practitioners, SC (Super Computing) Conference, November 16, 2011
• Parallel Education Status Check – Which Programming Approaches Make the Cut for Parallelism in Undergraduate Education?, Intel Developer Forum, September 15, 2011
• Battle of the Cloud Sync Solutions, Adobe Technology Summit, May 12, 2011
• Parallelism and Education: Navigating Through a Sea of Cores, Intel Developer Forum, September 13, 2010
• Preparing the World for Ubiquitous Parallelism, SC (Super Computing) Conference, November 20, 2009
• Flash Platform Gaming Showcase, Adobe MAX Conference, October 07, 2009
• What Role is Technology Playing in New Business Opportunities? (P.S. It’s already happening...), Photographic Archive Council of America Conference, October 26, 2008

Workshops

• Best Practices in Apprenticeship Programs for Diverse Tech Talent, Tech Inclusion, October 18, 2017
• Let's build a product development organization!, Agile by Example, October 10, 2016
• Intermediate Pixel Bender: Pixels and Beyond, Adobe MAX Conference, October 27, 2010
• Creating Effects with Pixel Bender, Adobe MAX Conference, December 02, 2008
• Creating Effects with Pixel Bender, Adobe MAX Conference, November 18, 2008