Thursday, May 15, 2025 Virtual Conference

Peter Palmér, LPPDE and Juha Tammi, Lean Association of Finland - Welcome and Instructions

Peter and Juha represent the two organization who organize these virtual online events and will moderate the Virtual Summit.

Matt Albin, Chief Change Agent, Solutions Coach at Spark Performance Solutions – Skills Matrix: A Simple Method to Build and Sustain a Skill Development Program

In new product development, organizations are focused on learning about markets, technologies, and customer needs. But what often gets overlooked is developing people, aligning skills to business needs, and sustaining those capabilities over time. This is critical during business transformations, when new ways of working require new skills and habits. In this session, Matt will share a practical, visual approach to identifying, developing, and sustaining the capabilities your teams need using the skills matrix tool. Whether you're launching a new initiative or evolving your operations, this method helps link training directly to business outcomes and supports the long-term growth of your team. 

What You’ll Learn:

• Connect Training to Business Goal: Use a simple framework to align organizational objectives with targeted training and development priorities.
• Assess Current and Needed Skills: Learn a collaborative, workshop-based approach to engage teams in identifying skill gaps and building a skills matrix.
• Sustainment through Integration: Discover how to embed the skills matrix into your management routines to drive long term success.

Matt Albin is passionate about helping individuals and organizations unlock potential through targeted talent development and sustainable behavior change. He brings deep expertise in Lean, Human-Centered Design, and organizational coaching.

Specialties include:

• Driving business improvement and sustainment through Lean and HCD methods
• Coaching leaders, staff, and teams in effective thinking and behavioral change
• Designing impactful eLearning and traditional development program

Sean McAuliffe, Director of Product Management at Shop Your Way (SYW)  – Transforming Product Strategies Into Market-Leading Solutions

How do you transform how your teams work? Not just what they deliver. Most transformation efforts focus on process, but the focus should be on people. No amount of Agile frameworks, OKRs, or quarterly plans can fix a culture where teams don’t feel safe, engaged, or empowered.

We need to work more with leadership, alignment & coaching and define the future culture you’re building (not just the one you’re escaping). Sean will share some of his deep knowledge and experience in this presentation.

Sean McAuliffe has helped organizations shift from process-heavy transformation to true cultural change rooted in Lean principles. By focusing on leadership behavior, psychological safety, and adaptive teaming, he build high-trust, high-performance cultures that move fast, learn faster, and deliver real outcomes. Sean has a long experience as product owner in diverse industries.

Ludvig Åhlin, Agile Transformation Lead at Swedbank – AI-Powered Bottom-Up Assessments: Accelerating R&D through team empowerment

In this session, Ludvig Åhlin will share a proven and innovative approach to agility assessments used at one of his banking assignments, leveraging AI to empower R&D teams in their efforts to shorten time-to-market. This bottom-up method focuses on team-level insights, fostering collaboration and efficiency across the organization.

Ludvig will introduce you to a systematic approach that involves conducting team-level agility assessments, incorporating feedback from various aspects of agile methodologies. The format includes interactive sessions where teams provide insights and improvement ideas, ensuring they own their growth actions and are encouraged to seek support as needed.

This approach is rooted in real-world experience, having been successfully applied in a banking context where line managers sought to enhance team efficiency. By using AI to analyze assessment data, leaders gain actionable insights that enable informed decisions. The approach leads to enhanced agility in product development, improved alignment between team capabilities and organizational goals, and foster a culture of continuous learning.

Through live demonstrations, Ludvig will show how AI tools can be used to derive valuable insights from assessment data. This session is ideal for R&D managers, agile leaders, and executives interested in improving team efficiency and innovation. You will leave with a clear understanding of how to implement AI-powered assessments in your organization, strategies to enhance agility, and tools to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Ludvig Åhlin is an accomplished Agile Coach and SAFe SPCT candidate at Swedbank, where he has been pivotal in driving agile transformations since September 2023. Prior to joining Swedbank, Ludvig was a consultant at Accenture, where he helped various companies across industries such as telecommunications, manufacturing, and banking with their SAFe journeys.

With over a decade of experience in agile methodologies and a deep understanding of SAFe, Ludvig has successfully led numerous initiatives focused on maximizing business value by empowering teams and leverage scaling effects. His session promises to offer valuable insights into creating more accurate, team-centric assessments that drive real-world improvements in R&D efficiency and time-to-market.

Final reflections and remarks

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By Juha Tammi & Peter Palmér

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