About

Built by practitioners. For practitioners. Since 2012.

Signal Not Noise is a conference community for the people building Australia's digital future — engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, delivery leads, researchers, and leaders across every stage of the journey.

We exist because the best insights don't come from keynote celebrities or vendor pitches. They come from people actually doing the work — and from what happens when those people get in the same room.

Where it started

In December 2012, a group of Melbourne-based practitioners from the agile meetup community came together to run the first LAST Conference — Lean, Agile and Systems Thinking. It was a one-day event built around the idea that great work happens when people share honestly, not when they perform at each other.

It grew. Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra all followed. Over thirteen years and more than 6,000 participants, LAST became one of Australia's most trusted practitioner-led conference communities.

But the landscape shifted. Agile became mainstream. The people who needed what we offered weren't just in delivery teams anymore — they were product managers, data scientists, engineers, designers and leaders who didn't identify with the Agile label but cared deeply about the same things: doing better work, building better teams, finding signal amid the noise.

In 2014, we started Spark the Change — an event series exploring meaning and purpose in workplaces and society. In 2015, we started 1st Conference, which concentrated on the foundations of business agility. 1st Conference is currently dormant.

Why we rebranded

In November 2025, at our Melbourne conference, we announced that LAST was becoming Signal Not Noise.

Not because LAST was broken. Because the name had become a ceiling. Too many people who belonged in the room were staying home because they assumed it wasn't for them.

Signal Not Noise is the same community, the same philosophy, the same practitioner-first approach — with a name that reflects who we've always been and who we're building for next.

The first Signal Not Noise conferences run in 2026: Adelaide in May, Sydney in June, Brisbane in October, Melbourne in November.

The conferences

Signal Not Noise runs one-day conferences across four Australian cities. Each event brings together 150–250 practitioners and leaders for a day of real talk, cross-functional learning and genuine connection.

There are no attendees at Signal Not Noise. Everyone is a contributor — whether you're speaking, facilitating, asking hard questions from the floor, or just being the person who makes someone feel welcome.

Sessions cover engineering, product, design, data, delivery, leadership and the messy intersections between them. The program is practitioner-curated, not vendor-driven.

The Club

The Signal Not Noise Club is our year-round online community — workshops, conversations and learning sessions that keep the conference energy going between events.

It grew out of LAST Anywhere, which started with a collaboration with Product Management expert John Cutler in 2019.

With the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020, we rapidly expanded the programme — running around 35 sessions with practitioners from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, the USA and Canada. What started as an emergency response to keep the community connected became something people wanted to stay for. The Club now has a library of 150+ recorded sessions and runs 12–20 new sessions each year.

See all the benefits of joining the Signal Not Noise Club

The team

Signal Not Noise is run by Ed Wong, who co-founded LAST Conference with Craig Brown in Melbourne in 2012. Craig remains a founding advisor and is still a visible part of the community on conference days.

Each city has its own organising team of local practitioners who volunteer their time because they believe in what the community does. That's always been the model, and it's not changing.

Tabar — the company behind Signal Not Noise — also organises Spark the Change Melbourne. Over the years, Tabar has worked with practitioners and thinkers including Jurgen Appelo, Alistair Cockburn, Lisette Sutherland, Bas Vodde, Joanne Molesky, Dr Peter Senge, Norman Bodek, Kriti Sharma and Professor Henry Mintzberg.

You can find out more on the Tabar website.

For more on the origins of LAST Conference, hear from Craig Brown, who told the story in 2018.