Persona put the user back into your user stories.

While we understand that our users are important we may lack language for talking about them. If you already know about persona you may find your approach for performing research and representing user data as a user persona to be time consuming and, what’s more, the persona you create simply aren’t being used. In this short tutorial you’ll learn to create simple relevant persona for your agile project, how to communicate them to the team, and how to use them generate valuable feature ideas, and design imperatives for your product.

Over the life of a product, Product Owners maintain an ever-evolving Product Backlog. As features rise in rank, the PO breaks them down into stories, eventually sized small so the team can deliver increments of valuable functionality in an iteration. In this tutorial, we will explore examples of how to evolve a product backlog from vision to iteration acceptance. Participants will practice breaking stories down, with an emphasis on understanding the considerations that guide that process. We will provide several examples from different types of projects/products.

This session covers a successful transition to a new business model in a limited time span. Typically, Iowa Student Loan (ISL) sells bonds to fund the creation of private student loans. As financial markets deteriorated in 2008, the potential of successful bond sales diminished to the point of nonexistence. Heretofore, our systems assumed ISL as the only lender. Collaborative bank relationships changed this assumption to one of multiple lenders. A redesign of the loan program/loan type structure of our software followed to make the funding model very configurable.