Agile Inception

The "Agile Inception" diplomas certify that their holder maintains an up-to-date and verifiable level of competence in the initial alignment of agile initiatives: preparing, sizing, facilitating, and closing an inception, and realigning an initiative already under way, with just enough shared understanding to start with purpose.

This diploma does not assess "theoretical knowledge" of kick-off methods, but the ability to decide whether an initiative needs an inception and how deep it should go, facilitate the alignment conversations until sufficient agreements are reached, and close and hand over the result to the work without turning it into a contract, with judgment about the role of artificial intelligence in the process.

Accredited Competencies

Holding these up-to-date diplomas certifies that the holder is able to:

1) Decide whether an inception is needed and size it

Recognize, for a specific initiative, whether it needs an inception, a short meeting, or neither, and grade its depth and format by novelty, uncertainty, risk, complexity, stakeholders, and dependencies, setting the validity horizon of the result.

2) Place it between discovery and delivery

Distinguish an inception from a Sprint 0, from an analysis phase, and from a project charter, take continuous discovery as its input and produce a start-up commitment that delivery will revise with what is learned.

3) Prepare participants, agenda and decision rule

Convene those who build, those who represent users, the technical leads, and anyone who can veto scope or budget; prepare purpose, prior information, a timeboxed agenda, and materials; and agree before the workshop who decides and by which rule.

4) Facilitate the conversations on purpose, vision and scope

Make the problem, the expected result, and the objectives explicit; write the vision as a group with the positioning template, the elevator pitch, or the product box; set the scope with the NOT list and separate facts, assumptions, and unknowns in the room.

5) Facilitate the conversations on context, team, solution, risks and constraints

Map actors and dependencies, align the team with working agreements and an initial Definition of Done, discuss the solution on a single page, classify risks with a pre-mortem, make constraints explicit with trade-off sliders, and size by order of magnitude without turning figures into promises.

6) Use the Inception Deck and Lean Inception flexibly

Apply the ten conversations of the Inception Deck and the week, activities and rules of Lean Inception (uncertainty traffic light, scales, feature sequencer and MVP canvas), choose their variants and adapt them to the context instead of running a recipe.

7) Choose the right technique for each conversation

Place the neighboring techniques (Product Vision Board, impact mapping, story map, pre-mortem, team canvas, PR/FAQ, EventStorming, and Design Sprint) as preceding, integrated into, or following the inception, and combine them according to the problem rather than the method.

8) Facilitate with neutrality and design the dynamics

Run the process without steering the content, design the session with explicit divergence, integration, and convergence, apply silent individual work before sharing, and manage the pace with timeboxes, breaks, and changes of dynamic.

9) Contain power and decide as a group

Recognize anchoring, the highest-paid person's opinion, and the pressure on dissenters; use silent voting as a probe, measure the degree of agreement, apply the agreed rule and record each decision with its context and consequences.

10) Facilitate remote and hybrid sessions

Design short remote sessions with a single board moderator, breakouts in pairs, and asynchronous work, and correct the bias of the hybrid format against those who take part remotely.

11) Close, hand over and realign

Check the essential outputs, steer the closing toward one of its three outcomes (go, go with conditions, or not now), produce a one-page record, carry the result into the Product Goal, the initial backlog, and the specifications, and recognize when an initiative under way needs a re-inception.

12) Use AI without replacing human alignment

Use AI to prepare, synthesize and document with human review, decide when to bring an AI-generated prototype into the room without anchoring the group, include agents as actors in products that incorporate them, and apply the principle that AI proposes and people decide.