The Agile2023 Conference Team is dedicated to creating a stellar international conference that furthers Agile principles and provides an avenue for people and ideas to flourish. We are working to bring you an amazing event that creates great experiences for all attendees. We cannot wait to share more details!

CONFERENCE CHAIR

Emma started out with a Computer Science degree and still enjoys technology and granularity of details. She has moved through different domains and job titles but was lucky enough to come across agile, and loves the people element and when she met the wider community she was hooked and felt like she belonged. 

PROGRAM CHAIR

Semira has played a role in planning and facilitating tech meetups since 2017. She was involved with both Cyber Security Non-Profit, an organization that aims to make cyber security education attainable for all people as well as Chicago Agile Open Space which was a collaborative community for Chicago based agile practitioners. In her spare time Semira mentors young people in college towards their professional goals.

PROGRAM CHAIR

Chris has spent his IT career wondering why we act the things we do while trying to make stuff. The human aspect of our work is the best part until our robotic overlords take over, so he focuses his time on making sense of everyone else’s messes. His first Agile20xx was in 2016 and he has been volunteering to make this conference its best ever since.

PROGRAM CHAIR

Dana is an Enterprise Agile Coach, passionate about infusing playfulness and unleashing collaboration in teams and organizations she coaches. Business games designer, speaker, author of “DevOps with Lego and Chocolate” and “Fear in the Workplace” games. Dana brings a powerful combo of multiple coaching styles, facilitation with Liberating Structures, deep knowledge of Agile and DevOps space as well as a breadth of experience working with remote teams and international clients.

TRACK CHAIR

Seb has been a consultant, coach, designer, analyst and developer for over 40 years. He has been involved in the full development lifecycle with experience that ranges from architecture to support, from BASIC to Ruby. During his career, he has worked for companies large (IBM, Amazon) and small, and has extensive experience of failed projects. He's now Developer Advocate with SmartBear Advantage, promoting better ways of working to the software development community. Seb is a regular speaker at conferences and occasional contributor to software journals, and is the co-author of the BDD Books series "Discovery” and "Formulation," lead author of “The Cucumber for Java Book,” and contributing author to “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.”

TRACK CO-CHAIR

Christina Hartikainen is the Director of Learning at ICAgile, where she works to help create transformational learning that ignites Agility in organizations. The impact of this work drives her passion and curiosity for evolution, growth, and leaning in to what could be possible. A self described “girl of many talents” she’s worked as a tester, developer, product owner, business analyst, facilitator, trainer, and more in both the public and private sectors.

TRACK CO-CHAIR

Emma started out with a Computer Science degree and still enjoys technology and granularity of details. She has moved through different domains and job titles but was lucky enough to come across agile, and loves the people element and when she met the wider community she was hooked and felt like she belonged. 

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Ant is an Agile coach at Nomad8, with a focus on Product Development, Business Agility and leadership. He’s worked with large organisations both in the UK and New Zealand, from RAD and DSDM in the 90s, XP and Scrum in the 2000s to a magic mix of Lean UX, Design Thinking and Agile today.

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Connector and catalyst. Love connecting people to people, people to ideas and ideas to ideas. Coach, Agile Best Self co-founder and Agilist.

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Jason is a product coach with proven experience coaching in FinTech Retail and the Public sector. Blending product & agile expertise among other things He helps organizations get better at Product Operations: optimizing the intersection between product engineering and design in order to shorten the feedback loop from strategy formation to in-market feedback

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Michael is an accomplished team leader, project manager, and Agile practitioner who has worked within the government tech space for more than 15 years. He has led web development projects, supported the procurement of digital tools and web support services, and fostered the adoption of Agile principles within public service. He’s also the creator of Smart Simple Digital, a web series that focuses on increasing digital literacy among creatives, entrepreneurs, seniors, and and other everyday achievers.

TRACK CO-CHAIR

Jenny is a connector and collector of people and ideas! She is an international speaker, Agile coach, and trainer. She has endless enthusiasm in fostering driving adoption of Agile values, principles, and practices in organizations large and small. Jenny co-created the “Game Design Canvas for Good Games Gone Bad” and the game “Never Would I Ever, Examining Your Agile Non-Negotiables”; and is a habitual conference organizer.

TRACK CO-CHAIR

Dana is an Enterprise Agile Coach, passionate about infusing playfulness and unleashing collaboration in teams and organizations she coaches. Business games designer, speaker, author of “DevOps with Lego and Chocolate” and “Fear in the Workplace” games. Dana brings a powerful combo of multiple coaching styles, facilitation with Liberating Structures, deep knowledge of Agile and DevOps space as well as a breadth of experience working with remote teams and international clients.

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Elena is an accomplished Agile Coach and a Leader of the Agile Enterprise Services Chapter within the Technology Group (TG) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, capable of leading an agile transformation by effectively collaborating, facilitating, leading and coaching across multiple teams following Scrum framework.

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Nayan is a Lean/Agile Coach with over 20 years of intensive hands-on experience in software development, enterprise architecture and project management methodologies. He has a passion for helping software teams increase their productivity and decrease their time-to-market while improving the quality of their product.

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Julie is a Senior Agile Coach at Beeline. She is the host of the Agile C’ville Meetup (Virginia, US), and loves co-creating fun, inclusive learning experiences with other passionate Agilists. Julie believes that great business results come from teams of happy, collaborating, engaged humans, and that Agile is much more Psychology than Process. Her mission is to raise the level of Joy in the workplace. She lives in Charlottesville, VA, her personal paradise of wine and mountains, with her teenage daughters (one at college).

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Ronica loves watching humans thrive and achieve together. She believes organizations of all types can elevate how people work together to unleash the potential of individuals and teams at all levels. They do that by creating cultures of learning, holistic thinking, safety, inclusivity, empowerment. She help leaders and teams create those cultures. Wherever she goes she strives to build and strengthen communities that support our members, feed their souls, fill their hearts, inspire their minds, and give people the strength to be awesome.

TRACK CO-CHAIR

Christine ('Tine) Zekis is an educator turned software engineer, international speaker, and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) advocate. She is the Founder and CEO of Getting Black Women Paid, which empowers Black women professionals to change the trajectory of their careers, dramatically increase their lifetime earning potential, and build generational wealth. 'Tine is a sought-after speaker on panels and at tech conferences where she discusses salary negotiation, career changers, imposter syndrome, and DEIB in the industry.

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Semira has played a role in planning and facilitating tech meetups since 2017. She was involved with both Cyber Security Non-Profit, an organization that aims to make cyber security education attainable for all people as well as Chicago Agile Open Space which was a collaborative community for Chicago based agile practitioners. In her spare time Semira mentors young people in college towards their professional goals.

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Kate Donaldson is an accomplished technologist and people manager with expertise in implementation, architecture, and strategy. She leads teams to build clean, performant, well-modeled products and services that help to make positive change in the world. Kate has spent her career fostering supportive, diverse, cooperative engineering departments, establishing strong and inclusive departments and teams. From spearheading pay equity initiatives to leading diversity, inclusion, collaboration, education and career development initiatives, she has a proven track record of forging high-performance, blameless cultures.

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Germán Flores helps organizations implement effective practices to manage work using agile principles and frameworks. Germán's coaching experience spans from the team level to the technology department level leadership. He is also experienced in implementing agile practices and project management practices in organizations.

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TRACK CO-CHAIR

Pradeepa is an Enterprise Agile thought & transformation leader, a self-proclaimed "Pragmatic Agilista," and an executive & leadership coach. She loves fostering environments where organizations become the best version of themselves. Her goal is to create workplaces where people thrive and love coming to work every day to make an impact and deliver high-quality products and services with customer-focused outcomes.

TRACK CO-CHAIR

Chris has spent his IT career wondering why we act the things we do while trying to make stuff. The human aspect of our work is the best part until our robotic overlords take over, so he focuses his time on making sense of everyone else’s messes. His first Agile20xx was in 2016 and he has been volunteering to make this conference its best ever since.

REVIEW LEAD

Aruna Chandrasekharan started her career as the lone software developer in Miami and grew in that space. In 2007, she was introduced to Agile and actively started championing for Agile ways of working for my teams. In 2011, her focus shifted from hands-on coding to coaching high performance teams across multiple levels of the enterprise. She has been able to leverage my background in software development & delivery, her intuitive understanding of the potential of Agile practices and her innate skills in diplomacy to impact transformative changes within her ecosystem.

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Roni Givati has 15+ years of experience as an internal Enterprise Agile coach, coaching executive leaders and teams in large global organizations that span multiple industries including Investment banking, technology, automotive and health care. Her focus is on evoking cultural change and continuous improvement through coaching individuals at all levels of the organization. She is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) through the International Coach Federation (ICF). She is trained in life coaching as well as Organization,Relationship & System coaching and has a strong background in organizational change, project management and team leadership.

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Bernie Maloney’s career started with a flash and a bang – his first position was designing devices that protect telephone networks from lightning strikes. He’s worked with teams that have grown businesses to beyond $100 million, delivering products from consumer electronics to network infrastructure to services & payments at firms including TiVo, Cisco, Wells Fargo and more. He’s also a Certified Scrum Trainer® teaching private and public workshops, including Agile Product Development and Agile Leadership at Stanford Continuing Studies. As an Agile Leadership Coach, Bernie helps clients achieve performance breakthroughs with their teams, their organizations and themselves.

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Andrew Leff is an Accomplished senior leader with over 15+ years global experience in finance, technology, government, marketing, logistics, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, and insurance industries involving both start-up and growth organizations. Excels as a visionary, strategic thought leader, influencer, trusted advisor, and Agile practitioner with the proven ability to lead organizational change and transformation. Successful in driving and improving performance and value within organizations. A people leader with an outstanding reputation as a coach and mentor to others. Hardworking, honest, dependable, able to adapt to any work group/environment, is tech savvy, a quick learner, a team player, and has excellent interpersonal skills.

TRACK CHAIR

Cheryl, a.k.a. bsktcase, has a couple decades' of experience as a software developer in the private and public sectors. She led her team's successful adoption of Scrum-ban for a mission-critical regulatory compliance project under multi-agency state and federal government oversight, and mentored former COBOL devs into true-believing unit-testing XP evangelists, all of which leads her to believe that anything is possible. Whether consulting or in-house, Cheryl endeavors to make life suck less for software delivery organizations and the humans who inhabit them.

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Zach Bonaker is a "benevolent trouble-maker" based in San Diego, California, USA assisting organizations with achieving their goals through improved working conditions and team-centric systems of work. With experience guiding Fortune 500 companies to multi-million dollar startups, Zach draws upon agile principles, the science of exceptional teams, Kanban and "flow", and systems thinking to cultivate effective, collaborative environments. Currently working with Sauce Labs as Director of Value Stream Operations, Zach is an international conference speaker, sought after mentor, and contributor of business agility knowledge across the globe. When he isn’t thinking about next-generation organizations, Zach can be found enjoying the sunny California weather and connecting with people all over the world.

TRACK CO-CHAIR

Melissa Boggs is a keynote speaker, leadership coach, and employee experience designer. She is host of the “Wild Hearts at Work” podcast, redefining our relationship with work through stories and conversations with those challenging the status quo of today’s workplace. Melissa is a former executive with a background in leadership, business, and product development. She is a former nonprofit CEO and board member, having served on the Board of Directors for both Scrum Alliance (as Co-CEO) and Agile Denver. She lives in Denver, CO with her family ( including a small zoo of 3 dogs and 2 cats) and spends her free time roller skating.