In today's landscape of tech layoffs and employment uncertainty, software teams everywhere are fighting to deliver more, faster, with fewer resources. While these constraints make agile practices more critical than ever, many organizations remain resistant to change and entrenched in legacy practices. Drawing from experience as a product manager in the (extremely anti-agile) federal government, this session reveals guerrilla tactics for practicing core agile principles in hostile territory. But these challenges aren't unique to government — they're faced by teams across many industries where established processes, compliance requirements, and rigid organizational structures create similar obstacles.

We'll explore field-proven solutions to common barriers: navigating lengthy procurement and security processes without sacrificing adaptability, breaking through functional and organizational silos to build stakeholder alignment, gaining meaningful user access despite institutional barriers, introducing modern tools and practices in traditional environments, and more. 

This session is for agile warriors trying to maintain their values while facing bureaucratic barriers, limited resources, and increasing pressure to deliver. Using both personal and secondhand federal government experiences as our extreme case study, attendees will learn battle-tested strategies for practicing agile principles even when everything seems stacked against them. If these approaches can work in an environment where change requires an act of Congress, they can work anywhere.