Dr. Doug Kaufman is an experienced leader, entrepreneur, and has served as TransLoc’s CEO from June of 2014 to August of 2019. Under Doug’s leadership, TransLoc established itself as a market leader for on-demand microtransit solutions, a position that was noticed by Ford Smart Mobility, who acquired TransLoc in early 2018. Prior to joining TransLoc, Doug founded several companies, including clearTXT (acquired by Rave Wireless), which provided mobile communications for colleges and universities, and Spring Engage (formerly Spring Metrics), a behavior analytics company. While working on his PhD in Social Psychology, Doug created AlleyDog.com, an educational resource that is currently being used by millions of students as an essential e-learning resource. Doug was also an early team-member at Blackboard where he played an integral role in deploying several key initiatives, which firmly established the company’s flagship e-learning platform. Doug is also a prolific public speaker and angel investor.
Keynote speaker and doer of many things, Jen Krieger is Chief Agile Architect at Red Hat. Most of her 20+ year career has been in software development holding many roles throughout the waterfall and agile lifecycles. At Red Hat, she lead a department-wide adoption of DevOps methodologies focusing on CI/CD best practices. Most recently, she worked with the Project Atomic & OpenShift teams, the company’s two leading products, to help establish strong working relationships while the organization scaled rapidly. Now, Jen is guiding teams across the entire company into agility in a way that respects and supports Red Hat’s commitment to open source.
Sarah Gray has been described by her peers as “the Beyoncé of project management”. When she’s not keeping project schedules and budgets on track, she likes to spend her time reading and stabbing her friends in the back in Battlestar Galactica: the Boardgame.
Bob Galen is an Agile Practitioner, Trainer & Coach based in Cary, NC. In this role he helps guide companies and teams in their pragmatic adoption and organizational shift towards Scrum and other agile methodologies and practices. He is a Principal Agile Coach at Vaco Agile, a leading business agility transformation company. He is also President and Head Coach at RGCG a boutique agile coaching firm.
Bob regularly speaks at international conferences and professional groups on topics related to software development, project management, software testing and team leadership. He is a Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), CAL I trainer, and an active member of the Agile & Scrum Alliances. He’s published three agile-centric books: The Three Pillars of Agile Quality and Testing in 2015, Scrum Product Ownership , 3rd Edition in 2019, and Agile Reflections in 2012. He’s also a prolific writer & blogger at http://www.rgalen.com and podcaster at http://www.meta-cast.com. Bob may be reached directly at: bob@rgalen.com or networking via: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobgalen
Jen Oleniczak Brown is the Founder of The Engaging Educator (EE), a women-owned and operated company dedicated to helping people find their unapologetic, authentic and best voice, communication style and self through improv-based education. Since 2012, EE has served over 40,000 students, working with such companies as Viacom, Food Network, The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue and CBS.
Jen’s work can be found in publications like Bustle, Fast Company, Forbes and Moneyish, as well as her first self-published book Improv(e): Using Improv to Find Your Voice, Style and Self (Balboa Press, 2018) and the upcoming Think on Your Feet: Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Impromptu Communication Skills on the Job (McGraw Hill Education, Fall 2019).
A firm believer in the idea that Yes, And can change the world – so firm it’s tattooed on her arm, Jen’s personal mission is to empower as many women as possible to stop playing small and know their incredible supernova powers. She currently lives in Winston Salem, NC with her husband Alex, dog Drumstick, and about two-dozen houseplants.
Dean Peters is not a mad scientist, nor does he play one on TV. However, he has been involved in product management for nearly a decade and a half, augmenting his understanding via his prior experiences as both a software engineer and a professional opera singer. Dean currently works a principal product manager at Citrix working in the area of search, with prior experience in analytics, mobile, SaaS, biometrics, and GIS at Aprimo, McClatchy Interactive, Dude Solutions, Westat, and CDSI respectively. More about Dean can be found on his blog, DeanOnDelivery.com.
With five large-scale agile transformations under his belt, Josh Anderson has seen it all—good agile, bad agile, and other things sometimes referred to as agile. With his recent founding of kazi, LLC, Josh now focuses exclusively on using his broad experience to accelerate his customer’s success through agile transformations and all other aspects of software engineering. As a founding member of the Agile Podcast Network, he delivers continuous content with his co-host Bob Galen in their agile-centric podcast The Meta-Cast. Follow Josh on Twitter @nosrednAhsoJ and learn more about his company at http://www.kazi.io.
An agile coach for over 7 years, Matt Takane is passionate about adapting working environments for customers to innovate, while ensuring individuals and interactions are never sacrificed. He is always striving to find new fun and immersive ways to learn and teach others. As a part of the Open Innovation Labs team, he leads customer delivery and internal enablement using Labs culture and open principles to cultivate a better way of working.
Tim Beattie is Engagement Lead for Red Hat Open Innovation Labs. Tim’s career in product delivery spans the last 17 years as an Agile and Lean coach, and is a continuous delivery and design thinking evangelist. He has helped transition large corporations to Agile with IBM, and now runs Open Innovation Labs residencies for Red Hat to bring people together to build meaningful products.
Jason Schreuder is a Certified Team Coach (CTC), one of the Certified Agile Coach designations within the Scrum Alliance. As a guide for Scrum, he helps build agile teams to execute any work. He also teaches and coaches agile principles and values which helps leaders become more responsive, adaptable and future proof. Jason has a diverse background of leadership, coaching, facilitation, and team-building skills gained from years in the military and the engineering/technology industry. His mission is to stay curious, and to help people be a proper human at work and in life. He is a self-diagnosed gourmand, a former adrenaline junkie, and a bit of a bibliophile. He tries not to take himself too seriously, and would like his epitaph to read “Well intentioned yet unskillfully done.” You can follow Jason’s musings and learn more about him at iterationsofjason.com.
Chris Curry is a long time Scrum Master recently turned Agile Coach. He has a background in technology and software development with a hiatus to play poker for a living. On Agile teams is where most of his time has been spent over the last 8 years. He’s been part of an Agile transformation in his current company wearing many hats over the last year and a half. He’s passionate about first understanding and building trust with individuals/teams in order to effectively coach those teams to the next level. Outside work, you’ll most likely find Chris outdoors whether it’s hiking or at a local brewery. If you see him in passing, be sure to say “Hi!” and introduce yourself.
Raj Motwani is a scrum master and team builder who started his agile journey by leading a bottom-up agile effort in the software team of a hardware-based company. He has since worked with multiple teams with varying degrees of agile maturity, in environments ranging from ones where he was the only agile coach, to others where he had the support and opportunity to learn from several seasoned coaches. Agile has had a deep impact on Raj and has changed him at a personal level. Before choosing to be a scrum master Raj has worn multiple hats – developer, technical lead, and product owner. When Raj is not helping his teams out, he enjoys playing board games and spending time with his wife and their recently adopted puppy. Raj’s long-term goal is to be a loving parent to at least 4 fur babies and making a difference in people’s lives.
Ted Copeland is an agile practitioner with a background in testing and test automation. He serves as Scrum Master for several teams in Red Hat’s Enterprise Data and Analytics organization, and is working with other agilists to explore the balance between autonomy and consistency when building an organization to meet the needs of the business at an enterprise scale. He enjoys coming up with ways for his teams to build play into their work. Ted occasionally tweets @CopelandTed, and can also be found on LinkedIn.
Arjay Hinek has been in project management since the ’90s, helping teams, companies, and even individuals apply agile as a culture rather than a process. While coaching teams, product owners, and management within small startups as well as large enterprises, he has delivered workshops, training sessions, and talks on all aspects of agile. Arjay is always looking for ways to help teams learn as they improve. He comments on those and other agile efforts in his blog, “So Agile It Hurts Sometimes,” at http://www.goscrumgo.com.