Topics I speak on
What I will accept invitations on
These are the things I have lived through at the solution-train level and have something concrete to say about. None of them are theoretical positions. They come from current programmes, the patterns the RTE/STE Guild discusses, and the chapters of the forthcoming book.
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Scaled Agile in safety-critical engineering: where SAFe needs adapting
Most SAFe writing assumes web-scale software. Automotive E/E development carries different constraints: ASIL safety cases, AUTOSAR interfaces, multi-year platform commitments, supplier ecosystems. The framework still applies, but parts of it have to be rewritten on the way in. This talk is about which parts, why, and what the cost of skipping the rewrite looks like in practice.
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What AUTOSAR taught me about backlog management
Backlog management in scaled Agile is largely an interface problem dressed up as a coordination problem. AUTOSAR enforces a discipline at the boundaries between software components that most Agile setups never quite manage at the boundaries between teams. This talk takes the parallel seriously: what an interface contract actually looks like at the team level, why story-level dependencies are a symptom of weak ones, and what changes when teams treat their slice of the backlog as an exported API.
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Distributed engineering across six countries: what scales, what doesn't
Programmes that span Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Mexico, and the USA expose every weak assumption in an Agile setup. PI planning, retro formats, escalation paths, decision protocols, all of it has to be re-examined when half the room is on a different continent and a different working week. This talk is about which Agile patterns survive that pressure, which ones quietly stop working, and what to put in their place.
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The Solution Train Engineer role: what's actually in the job
The STE role is one of the most under-described in the SAFe corpus. The framework documents say the role coordinates trains; in practice it is closer to running a mid-sized engineering programme, with budget exposure, vendor decisions, capacity allocation, and a lived dependency on a leadership style most coordinator-titled roles don't get to use. This talk is for organisations standing up their first Solution Train and the people taking the role on without a clear playbook.
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What does and doesn't transfer: from CTO of a university workshop to STE in automotive
A career-shape talk for engineers thinking about the path from technical lead to programme leadership. Some things travel well across that move (systems thinking, people-and-budget responsibility, comfort with ambiguity); others don't (positional authority, technical hands-on as the primary value created). This talk is honest about which skills are genuinely transferable, which ones have to be built fresh, and what a useful five-year horizon looks like from the middle of that move.