The first Lean Kanban conference, held May 6-8, 2009 in Miami, FL, was the inaugural gathering of the emerging Kanban community — 66 practitioners who came together a full year before the kanban-book-publication to discuss the application of kanban ideas to knowledge work. The event established the Lean Kanban conference series that would subsequently become the primary professional gathering for the Kanban community worldwide.
Origins
The conference emerged from discussions on the kanbandev mailing list — the primary online forum for kanban practitioners — between Anderson, Chris Matts, and Joshua Kerievsky. The mailing list had become active enough, and the community sufficiently dispersed across organizations and geographies, that a face-to-face gathering seemed viable. The Miami location was a practical choice for an event drawing attendees primarily from North America and Europe.
Program and keynotes
The conference featured keynote presentations from Anderson (presenting the Kanban Method), Dean Leffingwell (on scaled Agile and product development), and Alan Shalloway (on Lean and Agile for the enterprise). The combination of kanban-specific and adjacent Agile/Lean content reflected the conference's positioning: it was not exclusively a kanban event but a gathering of practitioners interested in the intersection of Lean, flow thinking, and Agile methods — a positioning that made sense given that the Kanban Method was still being codified.
Significance
The first conference preceded the kanban-book by a year — meaning it was organized around a set of ideas that had been circulating in presentations, blog posts, and mailing list discussions but had not yet been published in book form. This chronology is significant: it demonstrates that the Kanban community was self-organizing before the canonical reference existed. Anderson and Shalloway subsequently partnered to establish Lean Kanban University Inc. (later lean-kanban-inc) in 2011, institutionalizing the conference series.
The 66-attendee turnout for the first event was sufficient to demonstrate community viability, and the conference series grew significantly in subsequent years, with regional events in North America, Central Europe, and other markets becoming significant annual gatherings for kanban practitioners.