Industry thought leaders gather to discuss how Agile & a product mindset drive business value

Enfuse Group and our partners Stories Matter and The Practical Agile Company are fortunate enough to work with many organisations in the retail, food and hospitality sectors. Our combined experiences provide unique insights on key themes emerging around the challenges that many companies are facing in the world of Agile transformation and Product delivery.

In February 2023, Enfuse Group welcomed 40 delegates from a number of UK leading Retail and Hospitality organisations including Sainsbury’s, JustEat, The Body Shop, Curry’s, McDonalds, and David Lloyd Leisure to explore the current state and the future of Agile at our interactive event ‘Agile, Food and Retail Workshop’ held at the prestigious Royal Society of Arts. The day featured presentations from experts across Agile and Product, interactive participation from delegates, an insightful panel discussion featuring sector digital and executive leaders, and a session on innovation using Enfuse Group’s own design-thinking inspired Accelerator.Works.

The event was run in partnership with Stories Matter and The Practical Agile Company London, with founders Nick Jemetta and Ben Saich sharing their experience and guidance of Agile and Product, explaining how these can drive value in organisations.

Specific points discussed included:

• The state of Agile today. What have we seen since The Agile Manifesto was introduced back in 2001? What trends are occurring?
• How to navigate the uncertainty by adopting a product mindset and to move past rigid project-first approaches to fluid and flexible product-first thinking.
• Practical approaches that drive a Value Focus within an organisation, with a focus on both enterprise and team level adoption. 
• The widespread impact of Covid-19:, how this has impacted consumer behaviour and how have business adapted to the rapid shift in digital offerings.
• How to connect teams to business goals and the customer to ensure that teams are value led rather than doing work for works sake. 
• How to ignite rapid innovation to respond to customer and business demands. 

“A superbly curated event put together by the team at Enfuse with a tremendous cross-section of industries and domains within them present. The learning, sharing and problem-solving discussions were tremendously valuable and it was great (and I mean really great!), to do it face to face. Looking forward to the next one.”

– Stuart Richards (Director of Engineering, Sainsbury’s Tech).

As well as talks and workshops we led a panel discussion which offered the group a chance to ask direct questions and raise real time challenges. Our panellists included Shona McGuire, Global Digital Product Manager, The Body Shop; Tony Butler Director of Software and Engineering, The Body Shop; Mark Williams, Director of Technology, David Lloyd Leisure; Will Broome, CEO, UbaMarket. We wish to extend once again our thanks to our panellists and the interesting discussions their comments stimulated.

One key takeaway was that the Agile process must support maximising value for the business and its customers, the right approach is the one that achieves this - there's no one answer to this, especially in the ever-changing world of retail and hospitality! However, the attendees took home some approaches that we've seen work and we've already heard from many that they're using them. 

You can find more information about some of the topics that we covered here:

• The Right way to do Agile Wrong
• Product mindset
• Product capabilities & culture
• The Role Of The Scrum Master is to Help Create Value
• How to Break your top-level strategy into Agile chunks 
• How To create accountability without a deadline using Return On Investment (ROI) 
• How To deliver to a specific date using Agile
• You can also get at the index page here
  

If you would like to find out more about the workshop and the material covered, or would be interested in joining one of our future events, please get in touch Freya.Finnerty@enfusegroup.com