SUMMARY

• A lifelong learning enthusiast, change agent and a servant - leader who wants to leave a legacy, while selflessly empowering and helping others grow and succeed.
• An Agile and Lean enthusiast who fortifies his theoretical knowledge and expertise by leveraging Agile, Lean, Design Thinking and Systems Thinking principles with leading by example, challenging the status quo and preferring to be interested over being interesting.
• A visionary and an adept craftsman using soft skills such as motivation, social skills, empathy and thought provoking, as well as, hard skills such as facilitation, mentoring, teaching, reflective observing & coaching to help clients achieve organizational ambidexterity.
• Agile Coach, Confidential Master, Release Train Engineer, and Program and Project Manager, offering 13+ years of successful organizational leading, coaching, and mentoring to help organizations find that perfect balance between organizational anticipation and adaptation to achieve resiliency and agility, as well as, product exploitation and exploration to help create and deliver end-user meaningful value.
• While experienced and skilled in planning and managing various size products/programs/projects by aligning business goals with technology solutions to drive effective product development, process improvements, competitive advantage and bottom-line gains, I feel more at home inspiring, collaborating, facilitating, teaching, mentoring and coaching self-organizing teams to achieve these goals.
• While an excellent communicator leveraging managerial, technical, business and financial acumen to communicate effectively with teams, clients, management and executives, I find bigger value in letting communication be driven by teams doing the work to achieve shared understanding and validated learning.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Agility Consultant

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Agile and SAFe Coach, Trainer and Confidential Master helping clients transform their organizations in order to increase their overall ROI by improving their agility, eliminating waste and delays, reducing bureaucracy, and improving organizational resiliency and ability to more quickly and effectively address anticipated/unanticipated opportunities and threats.
• Organization: Helped a start-up company set up organizational structure with multiple Confidential teams. Facilitated, trained, coached and mentored management and teams on understanding Confidential, Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, Lean/Agile values and principles. Worked with company management to define and align Product vision and strategy, short and long-term expectations and relevant metrics (OKR’s) to measure and validate learning and overall progress.
• Teams: Facilitated and coached building strong relationship between Product management and Dev teams to instill collective ownership and responsibility. Helped Confidential teams embrace validated learning loops to ensure, not only quality and timely delivery, but that delivered increments will provide real-world benefits to end users. Facilitated creation of new HR policies to support team-work, collective risk-reward structures, as well as, individual team member growth. Took an active role of thought provoker by frequently questioning status quo and taking teams out of the comfort zone to instigate constant re-evaluation.
• Product: Coached Product management team to understand and embrace empirical experimentation as an imperative to identifying true customer-oriented value. Facilitated creation of Definition of Done and Definition of Ready and coached an overall understanding and adherence to it. Trained and coached Product Owner on Design Thinking and Confidential practices, creation of Product backlog, prioritization and team support.

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Organization: Participated in Organizational transformation from Waterfall to a Large Solution SAFe. Evaluated current organizational state and worked with executive management to understand direction organization would like to move in. Trained multiple lines of business on SAFe values, principles and framework itself. Coached middle management on taking more proactive coach/mentor role. Worked with HR department on modifying policies to better support team centric environment and decentralized decision-making.
• Teams: Facilitated required SAFe roles identification and organizational backfill of those. Coached and mentored COE team and individuals on understanding and building autonomy and self-reliance. Coached teams and individuals to ensure understanding of difference between being and doing “Agile”. Helped train newly formed Confidential teams in understanding SAFe and Confidential frameworks, as well as, importance of teamwork. Mentored and coached Program and Team level members on DoD, cadence, built-in quality and incremental value delivery.
• Product: Helped Program Management identify and create Product Value Streams. Coached Product Owner on creating Product vision and strategy, prioritization techniques and outcome-based metrics. Trained Product Management team on creating and prioritizing Program Increments. Facilitated 2 PI planning sessions as part of the . Helped teams establish dependency board for dependency risk mitigation.

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Organization: Assisted in transformation of multiple Confidential teams to improve their full Product development potential by utilizing Lean/Agile/ Confidential principles and values to improve predictability and reduce variability for Product delivery. Worked with Softhouse management and HR to adjust company policies to improve recognition and implementation of intrinsic motivators to help better align individual and team growth. Created and taught multiple courses for advancement of Confidential Master skills to help junior Confidential Masters further the understanding and applicable knowledge of Confidential .
• Teams: Coached teams on how to get most out of self-organization and how to independently and methodically come up with solutions and measure their effectiveness. Acted as impediment removal bulldozer, as well as coached/mentored Confidential teams on how to remove impediments on their own for long-term self-sustainment. Facilitated building a trusting and safe environment where opinions are welcome and appreciated, and problems are raised, discussed and resolved without fear of negative connotations. Facilitated iterative planning of work based on Confidential team empowerment to analyze, create and act on their decisions. Coached Confidential teams on benefits of built-in quality through XP recommended practices. Took an active role of thought provoker by frequently questioning status quo and taking teams out of the comfort zone to instigate constant re-evaluation.
• Product: Coached shift in balance from output-based thinking to outcome-based thinking to reduce overproduction and inventory wastes. Coached and mentored multiple Product Owners in thought-provoking and creative process to maximize Product potential by utilizing Design Thinking, Lean UX and Lean Thinking principles. Mentored and coached Product Owners on Release planning techniques and User Story maps. Supported and coached Product on User Story writing, as well as grooming and maintaining the Product Backlog to elicit end-user generated solutions and strategies. Facilitated creation of Definition of Done and best coding practices.

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Organization: Assisted in transition of Podium Data to a true Product based focused company by adopting certain aspects of Design Thinking and Confidential framework as tools to achieve set goals. Initially, assessed the overall organizational maturity level, followed by and coaching of Lean, Agile and Confidential values and principles at a pace that was sustainable and comfortable for the teams and the management. Facilitated and coached the understanding and implementation of Confidential framework and its’ roles, artifacts and ceremonies. Coached the organization on how to use Lean/Agile/ Confidential principles and values to their benefit in order to build resiliency and better responsiveness to change. Coached and facilitated organizing and delivering product related work in-tune to end-user needs, faster time-to-market and with higher quality.
• Teams: Mentored and coached multiple newly formed Confidential teams on adaptation of continuous improvement, waste identification and removal, and minimizing done work to improve Product increment flow (cycle time) and reduction in inventory. Coached Confidential teams to focus on constantly improving teamwork and their best practices, causing an increase in overall output (40-100%) and code quality to significantly improve over one-year period. Focused on identification and removal of any and all impediments that detracted from safe, collaborative environment for the teams to work in. Coached and facilitated improved communication techniques as the main cultural pillar to improve teamwork, further improve lines of communications, build trust, and respect between the Confidential teams and rest of the organization.
• Product: Facilitated Product vision definition and long/short term Product strategy creation. Coached and mentored Product Owner on shifting focus towards outcome-based Product strategy and Product increment prioritization, as well as, determining success measuring metrics to improve validated learning in order to understand needed adjustments and pivot the Product. Facilitated the creation of a Definition of Done to better align Product Management and Development teams in improving shared understanding of Product goals. Facilitated and coached Product Management and Confidential teams on introduction of product and information radiators to measure and enhance Product development, inter-team communication and overall organizational alignment.

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Organization: Participated in SAFe framework implementation which led to successful completion of 2 major Product enhancements including legacy website content migration to main company website and development of responsive application for mobile devices. Worked with Director of Program Management and other functional managers on SAFe Continuous Delivery Pipeline creation, SAFe Teams role backfill, ceremony and cadence implementation and an overall process overview. Trained and coached multiple levels of organization on Lean/Agile Mindset, SAFe principles and Core Values. Leveraged process analysis and continuous improvement to identify impediments and weak points, and mentored and coached organization on adjusting trouble areas to continuously improve the process.
• Teams: Trained, mentored and coached 3 Confidential teams into delivering multiple new features and platform enhancements, coupled with a large reduction of technical debt through built-in quality improvements. Mentored and coached functional managers on understanding how to empower and better support and empower team members in their autonomy. Coached the teams into steadily increasing their velocity (~50-85%) by introduction of systems thinking, introduction of System Architect to create and maintain the architectural runway, reduction of turnaround time for impediment resolution, implementation of CI/CD pipeline and vintroduction of built-in quality through XP best practices. Trained and coached Confidential Teams to effectively measure Sprint progress and team output, radiate the information vertically and horizontally and pivot accordingly. Facilitated Retrospective sessions and coached teams to ensure that suggestions were prioritized and implemented in subsequent sprints. Facilitated bi-weekly Confidential Teams Demos, System Demo and Innovation and Planning Iteration.
• Product: Coached Product Management team define and prioritize new Features/Epics and mentored Product Owner and VP of Development on properly identifying and prioritizing Enablers. Trained and Coached Product Owner on using SMART criteria for writing User Stories and making adjustments to acceptance criteria through collaboration with the team. Organized and coordinated UAT and Production releases. Relentlessly worked to remove any Product development related impediments that slowed down team progress. As a Release Train Engineer in, participated in preparation, scheduled and facilitated Product Increment planning sessions to define Release Roadmap, User Stories and User Story dependencies.

Program Manager

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Organization: A hybrid role that started off as an interim Program Manager, then a Confidential Master to a couple of teams, which evolved into an Agile Team Coach role teaching, mentoring and coaching 13 Confidential teams over 4 years to mature by ensuring viable Product vision and strategy, organizational alignment with the strategy, incremental and frequent delivery of end-user value, individual empowerment and teamwork, adherence to organizational quality standards and inspect-adapt mindset got continuous improvement for organization, teams and product. Participated in making adjustments to PMO for improved product to market efficiency and overall development cost reduction by introduction of Confidential and a proprietary scaling framework, defining Value Streams, empowering technical decision-making on a team level and continuous improvement through adjustment and/or removal of poorly streamlined processes and waste for faster time-to-market.
• Teams: Guided 13 Confidential teams through the transition process and educated, supported and encouraged team members in understanding and embracing Confidential and Agile values and principles. Provided guidance and coaching throughout the transformation process on the steps needed to create and properly execute Sprint goals. Mentored and coached teams on embracing continuous inspect-adapt mindset to help them minimize output variability and create sustainable pace. Mentored and coached junior Confidential Masters on improving their craft.
• Product: Trained, mentored and coached the Product Manager on setting the overall product direction and product Strategy and fostering the roadmap. Trained and coached Confidential teams successfully deliver multiple Product enhancements, integration projects, legacy subsystem upgrades and improvements in code quality through significant technical debt reduction. Coached the organization on creating and aligning multiple streams working on the client’s platform via Business context, vision and team/program objectives. Designed and implemented multiple Senior Management and Client reporting mechanisms. Improved reporting which enabled the client and internal management to better focus on progress and issues. Helped envision and co-create mechanisms to plan Program scope through Release planning and JAD sessions and monitor Program performance KPI’s.