8:30 AM–5:30 PM
Registration

Location: MUSEUM LOBBY + Texas Spirit Theater lobby

8:30–9:15 AM
Continental Breakfast

Location: Austin Room, 3rd Floor

9:20–9:30 AM
Welcome & Opening Remarks

Location: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd FLOOr

9:30–10:20 AM
Get your team’s sh*t together! How to create and evaluate frameworks for efficient outcomes.

Location: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

In today’s world, efficiency is king. Creative and marketing budgets are being cut, and teams are being downsized with an expectation that quality, timeliness, and profitability will remain stable. Doing more with less has been touted as the rallying cry for the creative industry for years, and it’s getting more real by the day. The most successful organizations and leaders have been proactively optimizing their teams and processes for a variety of reasons: innovation, experimentation, and yes, survival.

It’s time to consider how you operate in frameworks and how you evaluate your efficiency within them regularly. This isn’t about retrospectives or postmortems–we’re talking about going deeper: honestly evaluating your team’s relationships, partnerships, communications, collaboration, and culture to evaluate and optimize operations for improving efficiency.

In this session, you will learn the following:

• How to think about frameworks and how they can inform better processes

• A lightweight method for identifying and evaluating issues

• How to engage everyone from your company’s leadership to your most junior team member in evaluation and change

• How to brainstorm, prioritize, and roadmap solutions

10:30–11:20 AM
Leading with Confidence: Overcoming Fear as a Non-technical Project Manager

Location: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

Navigating the digital landscape as a non-technical Project Manager can be a daunting task, often filled with uncertainties and fears. In this talk, I will share my journey of overcoming these challenges and thriving in a digital role. We will explore practical strategies for bridging the gap between technical teams and project goals, fostering effective communication, and leveraging unique skills that you can add to your playbook.

Join me as we delve into real-world experiences, discuss how fear shows up, and discover how to build confidence and credibility in a tech-centric environment. Whether you're a seasoned PM or just starting your journey, this talk will provide you with the insights and tools needed to turn fear into a driving force for success, ensuring you can lead with confidence and inspire your team to achieve greatness.

Key takeaways:

• Overcoming Job-Related Fear: Practical tips on how to overcome the fear associated with doing your job and turning anxiety into motivation.

• Leveraging your strengths: Discover how your role is pivotal in the project success and how your unique advantages maximize the strength of the team.

• Navigating technical challenges: Strategies on how to tackle technical conversations with clients and teammates.

• Addressing Big Conversations with Clients: Approaches to confidently handle and manage important conversations with clients.

• Continuous Learning: Embrace the mindset of ongoing learning and adaptability to stay current with digital trends and technologies.

11:30 AM–12:50 PM
Breakout

Location: CLASSROOMS, 1st floor

1:00–2:30 PM
Lunch

Location: Austin Room, 3rd Floor

2:30–3:20 PM
Lightning Talks

Location: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

Details coming soon!

3:30–4:20 PM
Say ‘No’ to Clients, Without Getting Fired

Location: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

Are you tired of clients who demand everything for nothing—and who joke about wanting it all "yesterday"? Clients are going to client... but you don't have to take it.

The solution? A simple yet powerful 3-step process to negotiate difficult client conversations. Karl Sakas’ "Reason, Options, Choose" (R-O-C) framework helps you say "no" to clients who want to hear "yes."

Karl has advised hundreds of agencies worldwide—and PM'ed clients large and small. When you implement R-O-C, you'll reduce your team's stress while increasing your profit margins. And tough clients will finally see you as a peer, not a peon.

Takeaways:

• Learn the 3-step "Reason, Options, Choose" negotiation framework.

• See examples of ways to use R-O-C at your agency.

• Get ideas to reduce stress and increase profit margins, by resetting client relationships.

Bonus: Need to vent about your worst clients? We'll have prizes for audience members who volunteer to "play" a terrible client, joining Karl on stage. Either way, you'll be laughing and learning.

4:30–5:20 PM
The Art of War for Project Managers

Location: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

Being a project manager isn’t just a job—it’s a daily battlefield. Navigating through a maze of complex problems, over-allocated teams, resource-strapped organizations, and impatient clients can leave project managers feeling overwhelmed and disconnected. Despite their best efforts, the role often feels like a 70% failure rate. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In this session, you will discover how to apply the timeless wisdom of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to your role as a project manager, empowering you to:

• Harness hidden sources of agency and wield them effectively

• Identify and overcome true obstacles blocking your path to success

• Recognize and mitigate self-imposed limitations

• Start each day feeling empowered, confident, and in control of your choices

• Navigate daily negotiations with strategic finesse

• Identify when you have the upper hand and create advantageous situations when you don’t

• Turn constraints into opportunities for innovation and success

• Foster a work environment where safety, collaboration, and creativity thrive, allowing your team to excel without burnout

Join us to transform your project management approach, leveraging ancient strategies to conquer modern challenges. Walk away equipped to lead with confidence, create exceptional outcomes, and build a more humane and effective workplace.

5:20–5:30 PM
Closing Remarks

Location: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

7:30–9:00 PM
Social Event

Location: SPEAKEASY AUSTIN, 412 Congress Ave. D, Austin, TX 78701

BUREAU MEMBER TICKET AT $999

NONMEMBER TICKET AT $1,399

8:30–9:15 AM
Continental Breakfast

LOCATION: Austin Room, 3rd Floor

9:20–9:30 AM
Welcome Day 2

Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

9:30–10:20 AM
Chaos to Collaboration: Managing Reorgs, AI, and Change

LOCATION: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

70% of all change initiatives fail. Why? Because of how the change was managed. As leaders, it’s our job to steer these changes effectively, ensuring they deliver as promised. We’ll explore a case study involving three team mergers in less than two years, examining the influences of Artificial Intelligence, economic factors, and new processes.

The demand for skilled change management is at an all-time high, requiring resilience at all levels for effective implementation and sustainability. This session will explore how change management affects our teams and clients, and why successfully managing change is a key determinant of our success.

Takeaways included in this session are:

• Recognizing the effects of successful vs. unsuccessful organizational changes

• A tactical approach to facilitating and navigating change

• Transforming change into a competitive advantage for your teams

10:30–11:20 AM
Generative AI took stuff off my plate. Now what?

LOCATION: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

It’s 2024, and GenAI tools can create your timelines, prioritize requirements, run your daily stand-ups, identify and track risks, compile your status reports, and even handle your meeting minutes.

What excuses do you have left for not being an irreplaceable, badass, business-savvy project delivery force of nature?

In this session, Galen Low from The Digital Project Manager shares his pragmatic perspective on the future of digital project management and what you need to do right now to capitalize on the new landscape you find yourself playing in. 

Using a mix of storytelling and interactive exercises, Galen will start by taking us through some practical, time-saving ways to use AI to carve out more time in your day. Then we’ll shift gears into creating a personalized career roadmap for what you can achieve with that extra time. 

After this session, you’ll be able to:

• Use GenAI to finally achieve a 40-hour work week

• Reframe your role and value in a GenAI world

• Update your career roadmap with options that didn’t exist this time last year

• Feel confident in your plan to stay relevant, strategic, and essential in 2025 and beyond

11:30 AM–12:50 PM
Breakout

LOCATION: CLASSROOMS, 1st floor

1:00–2:30 PM
Lunch

LOCATION: Austin Room, 3rd Floor

2:30–3:20 PM
Leading Projects in the Age of Chaos

Location: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

In the past 4 years, we have seen civil unrest, a pandemic, a ground war of a scale not seen in Europe since WW2, and constantly shifting markets. Tech burnout reached record levels in 2022 and 2023 with over 71% of workers self-reporting as having moderate to high burnout in a sample size of over 30,000.

We invented and had to learn a new way of working during the worst of the Covid crisis. Our work world has changed, and the pace of industry is increasing, but has our understanding of team health and psychological safety evolved? In this workshop, we will discuss behavioral science to support projects and organizations maneuvering conflict and crisis. Participants will explore strategies that work to foster healthy teams and bust myths about outdated approaches.

Behavioralist and former trauma/burnout studies practitioner Zach Stone will discuss what he has learned throughout his career, how he supported his team in Ukraine during the invasion and war, and how high-performing portfolios manage crisis.

We will discuss why many of the old rules for team building are outdated in the new age of chaos and how to build resilience in your organization.

Learning outcomes

Participants will learn how to:

1. Identify core symptoms and signs of burnout and a breakdown in trust at the organizational level.

2. Develop a neuroscience-supported understanding of why traditional team building can cause more harm than good when teams are in crisis or have low psychological safety. 

3. Understand how to create a "wraparound team" (from trauma response) and how to apply the four-step crisis management model ( Assessment, Stabilization, Intervention, and Recovery) to the world of Project Management and Software Development. 

4. Participants will break into small groups and identify immediate steps they can take to support teams in crisis.

3:30–4:20 PM
Dismantling the Déjà Vu: Identifying and Unwinding the causes of the most common anti-patterns BEFORE they start!

LOCATION: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

I’ve walked into countless organizations “doing Scrum” and I’m almost guaranteed to see the same things over and over from emotionlessly reciting the 3 questions, to breaking a fixed scope project into sprints, to committing to sprints based solely on point total. But why?!? Why do we see these same things over and over?!?

In this session we’ll identify the common anti-patterns, uncover the underlying causes, and determine how to fix them (hopefully) before they start.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify common anti-patterns in product development

• Uncover the underlying causes

• Determine ways to overcome and unwind them

4:30–5:20 PM
Unleashing the Power of Project Management: A Path to Scalable Growth

LOCATION: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor

Mighty Citizen’s project management office (PMO) is the largest department in their agency—and for good reason. Effective project management enables other team members to perform their roles more efficiently, drives sales, and leads to increased client satisfaction. However, successfully growing your project management department at scale requires a careful amount of nuance and strategy.

Join us for an engaging session where we’ll unveil the secrets behind our Project Management team's remarkable success and growth. This presentation will highlight our servant leadership philosophy and demonstrate how effective project management optimizes resource allocation, fostering productivity. We’ll cover strategies for task allocation and the roles of project managers and coordinators — and share the journey of our growth, including the introduction of our scalable team structure and pod setups.

By the end of the presentation, you'll have the knowledge and tools to unlock the potential of your project management team, paving the way for scalable growth within your agency.

Key Takeaways:

• Establishing the value of project management within your agency, gaining support and recognition from stakeholders.

• Creating an efficient division of labor for effective project management.

• Building a team structure that can scale with agency growth.

5:20–5:30 PM
Closing Remarks & Thank You’s

LOCATION: Texas Spirit Theater, 2nd floor