Agile Connect Rochester 2026
Upstate New York's Premier Agile Meetup

Date: Oct 1, 2026

Time: 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM with a happy hour afterwards

Location: Hyatt Regency Rochester

TechRochester's Agile Connect is the premier agile meetup in Upstate New York and you don't have to be an agile pro to join the fun.

From beginners to seasoned practitioners, we bring together curious minds from 40+ companies for a high energy day of learning, connection, and practical insights you can actually use. Whether you're just agile curious or you've been living and breathing agility for years, you'll find your people here.

This is where Rochester's tech and product community comes to connect, grow, and get energized about what's next.

Registration closed - SOLD OUT

AGENDA

8:00 AM - 9:00 AM

Registration & Breakfast

9:00 AM - 9:15 AM

Opening Remarks

9:15 AM - 10:30 AM

Keynote Speaker

10:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Break & Networking

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Breakout Sessions

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Lunch & Networking

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Breakout Sessions

2:00 PM - 2:30 PM

Break

2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Panel Discussion

3:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Networking & Happy Hour

Where Agile minds meet and momentum builds |

Keynote SPeaker

Building Resilience

Tricia Broderick, Co-Author of Lead without Blame

Tricia Broderick, co-author of Lead without Blame, is a highly respected leadership and organizational advisor with over twenty-five years of experience. In 2020, she founded Ignite Insight + Innovation to further her mission of “Igniting What’s Possible.” Today, she is a dynamic CXO at X2A, who aligns vision, capability, and impact to create meaningful experiences that help people and organizations become tomorrow-ready.

A sought-after advisor, facilitator, trainer, keynote speaker, and author, she is known for her passionate, authentic, and results-oriented leadership. What makes Tricia especially powerful as a speaker is the way she brings both depth and humanity into the room. She blends theory with lived experience, offering practical insight, honest perspective, and the kind of hard-won wisdom that resonates with real people doing real work.

Breakout Sessions

Stuck in the Middle? A Guide to Navigating Change

Chris Macri, Sr Manager - Enterprise Portfolio Management, Paychex

Most people don't struggle with change because they resist it. They struggle because they find themselves in the middle, caught between what was familiar and what's not yet clear. This interactive workshop helps participants make sense of that in-between space. Using a simple three-phase framework, we'll explore the endings we must let go of, the uncertainty of the middle, and the possibilities that emerge with new beginnings. You'll map a real change you're facing today, identify where you are on the journey, and connect with others to share lessons, challenges, and practical strategies for moving forward. Through conversation, reflection, and peer learning, you'll discover that many of the struggles of change are universal and that we often have more wisdom than we realize. Leave with a fresh perspective, actionable insights, and a repeatable framework that will help you navigate current and future changes with greater clarity, resilience, and confidence.

Making Sound Product Decisions: From Vision to Value

Dan Sharp, Product Manager, ITX

As AI accelerates delivery, product teams are under more pressure than ever to make sound decisions. But most teams still have more ideas than time and more opinions than evidence. This hands-on workshop gives participants a repeatable mental model for connecting business outcomes to the right opportunities, evaluating solutions in terms of real dollar impact, and communicating those decisions to skeptical stakeholders. Using a single fictional product scenario throughout, participants work from a defined business outcome to solution ideation and impact assessment, using AI to pressure-test assumptions, help synthesize qualitative data, and build a value case they can defend in the room.

You will leave with a practical model and set of AI prompts they can immediately apply to evaluate solutions that drive business impact.

Loaded Toolkits: Setting methodology dictates aside to deliver business value and happy customers.

Leighanne Barry, Senior Agile Team Coach, Wegmans Food Markets

Michelle Nemitz, Senior Project Manager, Wegmans Food Markets

Implementing complex software is rarely a single project. It is multiple workstreams, competing priorities, vendor dependencies, and teams that are not fully dedicated.

In this interactive 45-minute session, we share a real implementation where a Project Manager, Product Owner, and Agile Coach had to move beyond traditional role boundaries to keep delivery moving with hard deadlines. Rather than choosing a methodology, the team combined milestone planning, backlog visibility, and iterative delivery practices to manage four parallel workstreams under real constraints.

Participants will work through common delivery scenarios, including slipping dependencies and overloaded teams, and explore how role flexibility, visible work, and shared decision-making improve flow and outcomes.

This session is for leaders and practitioners who are less interested in methodology debates and more focused on getting complex work across the line.

Why Isn't This Getting Built Faster? Diagnosing the Problems Agile Can't Solve

Sheila Herbert, Founder and CEO of Conspiracy Product Co. and Co-founder and CTO of UnderStory Works

"Why isn't this getting built faster?"

It's one of the most common questions in product and technology organizations. The answer is usually another delivery improvement: refine the backlog, improve estimation, optimize ceremonies, or ask teams to become "more agile."

But what if the real problem isn't delivery?

Program managers, Scrum Masters, engineering leaders, and product leaders are often expected to solve delivery challenges that were created long before work reached the team. By the time an initiative enters execution, the decisions that determine its success may have already been made.

In this interactive workshop, you'll use a real initiative from your own organization to diagnose the problems hiding upstream. Together, we'll uncover hidden assumptions, misalignment, and readiness gaps that quietly undermine delivery, regardless of the framework your team follows.

You'll leave with a practical diagnostic you can apply immediately to identify whether you're facing an execution problem or a decision problem, and with new ways to influence better conversations before teams start building.

Every AI Failure Is an Agile Lesson in Disguise

Matt Doyle, Solutions Architect - FLX AI

Quinn Karley, Program Manager, AI Transformation & Client Success - FLX AI

The frustrations teams have with AI (it builds the wrong thing; it talks past you; it looks done when it isn't) turns out to be an old agile lesson in new clothes. This interactive session traces the most common AI failures back to the fundamentals that scrum masters, coaches, and POs already coach: a shared understanding, a common language, and a definition of done that can't be gamed. Through quick group exercises and a short demo, attendees practice the fixes to get AI to be more Agile and leave with a sharper case for why their craft matters more now, not less.

Anatomy of a Prompt:What Happens After You Hit Enter

Marshall Strong, Leonardo Cassetta-Unrath & Kevin Sykes, Golisano Institute

Most of us use AI every day, but few of us know what happens after we press Enter, or how much of the answer’s quality is in our own hands. In this interactive workshop, we’ll open up a single prompt and show what the AI actually receives, what it does with it, and what every answer costs in time and money. Then we’ll adjust the two settings most people leave on default: which model answers, and how much effort it spends. Working in table groups with just pencil and paper, you’ll judge real answers to the same question without knowing which settings produced them. You’ll leave with practical rules for when a bigger model or more effort is worth it, and a simple way to check an answer’s quality instead of hoping it’s right.

Meet our Sponsors

Paychex

Breakout Sponsor

Website
ITX

Breakout Sponsor

Website
Wegmans

Breakout Sponsor

Website
Mindex

Panel Sponsor

Website
Tek Systems

Happy Hour Sponsor

Website
X2A

Sponsor

Website
Clear Sky

Wifi Sponsor

Website
Understory

Community Sponsor

Website
FLX AI

Swag Sponsor

Website

Event Information

Hyatt Regency Rochester is attached to the South Avenue Parking Garage, which serves as the main parking facility for the Hotel. Fees will apply for parking.
There will be an extra room available for those who need to step away for a meeting/call during the event.