Events Conference Session
Virginia Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference (CAAC #18)
This event took place on Friday, July 17, 2026, so registration is closed. See current training or get in touch about booking Michael.
Michael Vizdos led the opening session of CAAC 18 on July 17, 2026, on Scrum Masters and Product Owners, as the Virginia Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference took on agile roles and responsibilities within the team and beyond. The full recording is on the Virginia State Police YouTube channel.
Commonwealth Agency Agile Conference · CAAC 18
Agile Roles & Responsibilities: Within the Team & Beyond
Michael spoke Led session 1: Scrum Masters and Product Owners · Volunteer planning team
-
Welcome, agenda and the conference roadmap 0:00:00
Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)
The host opens after a break in the schedule, walks through the planning team's topic roadmap for the next year, and warms up the audience on Slido: what makes a good actor in a role, and what makes a good team member.
- The roadmap is revisited after every conference, the same way a team revisits its plan.
-
Scrum Masters and Product Owners 0:10:22
Michael Vizdos (EdVizion) guest
A five-minute tour of the 2020 Scrum Guide, then the two accountabilities that are most often turned into job titles. Michael covers what a Scrum Master is for (coaching the team to solve its own problems, not solving them for it) and why the Product Owner is one accountable person, with agency examples and questions from the chat.
- Scrum's accountabilities are not job titles, even though most organizations have turned them into job titles.
- A Scrum Master teaches the team to remove impediments. Removing them all yourself makes you the bottleneck.
- Leave each retrospective with one improvement the team commits to, not a list of 80. Keep outsiders out of the room, and make the result visible to leadership.
- The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. You can delegate the work, including to a vendor, but not the accountability.
- In a state agency, product value is usually a customer problem solved or a process made simpler, not revenue.
In the Scrum Guide: The Scrum Team · Scrum Master · Product Owner · Product Goal
-
Developers and the roles around the team 1:10:41
Tim Roesch (Virginia Department of Education)
Tim covers the third accountability, developers, and then the people around a Scrum Team: stakeholders, line managers, architects, DevOps, information security, UX, agile coaches and proxy Product Owners. Practitioners from Virginia State Police add how their teams handle automated testing, deployment and performance reviews.
- "Developers" means everyone who builds the increment: testers, analysts, information security, not only people who write code.
- Developers split up and manage the work themselves. A manager assigning tasks at the daily scrum is an anti-pattern.
- Don't measure individuals by velocity or story points.
- Swarming on a stuck story is often faster than working alone: in one example a team finished in an afternoon a story it had estimated at six weeks.
- A Sprint Review for back-end work still has something to show: the business result, such as transactions running 20 to 30 percent faster.
- Virginia State Police writes agile teamwork into every team member's Employee Performance Profile, which ends "that's not in my EP."
- Bring architects, DevOps, information security and UX in early, without letting any of them become a gate at the end.
In the Scrum Guide: Developers · Sprint Backlog · Daily Scrum · Sprint Review
-
Conference retrospective 2:09:01
Stephen Manley (Virginia State Police)
Attendees rate the morning and suggest changes on Slido. The organizers explain why an 18th conference went back to basics: at every conference about a quarter of attendees have never done agile, and another quarter have done it for less than a year.
- Requested next: panels, agency case studies, deeper single-topic sessions, breakout tracks, and agile with AI, which the planning team is weighing against state limits on AI use.
About these pages: curated and reviewed by Michael Vizdos, on the volunteer CAAC planning team since CAAC 4 and a speaker at CAAC 5, 10, 11, 17 and 18. Summaries and takeaways are drafted with AI (Claude) from the recording's captions and reviewed by Michael Vizdos before publishing (how I use AI). This is not the official conference site; the Virginia State Police hosts CAAC (vsp.virginia.gov/caac). Last reviewed October 20, 2026.