I’m passionate about the customer and Agile product development. My unorthodox entry into tech and product gives me a diverse edge with product and technical teams. I’m especially creative, analytical, inquisitive, and able to distill complex issues into simpler, clear steps for action. I take principles from Agile and Lean; practices from Scrum, XP, Kanban, lean product discovery and experimentation; and draw on wider research and disciplines to flexibly coach leaders and teams toward excellence.
My mission is to encourage learning, test assumptions, and build trust amongst humans who create products to improve their customers’ lives. I welcome input from my colleagues around what our mission means to them, what challenges we need to work through, and what makes the most sense to get the best outcome for teams, their customers, and company.
I believe my job as an Agile Product Coach is to create great conditions for product teams to deliver together, to help them see the bigger picture, and deliver the right thing at the right time by meeting with real customers, testing and getting feedback as often as possible.
My experience as an Agile Coach in various product organisations helps me as a Product Coach, Team Coach, or interim Product Manager to also drive needed change within the organisation to maximise the value from teams. I understand the common challenges product organisations face and how to navigate them with calm effectiveness.
Some of my Clients
- Cambio
- Mentimeter
- Tele2
- Xero
- Trade Me
Skills and Experience
Discovering & delivering value
- Mapping assumptions and impacts for product clarity
- User story mapping, slicing value to test and learn fast; enabling teams to deliver experiments on time by guiding them through activities to isolate the most valuable work to test
- Challenging Product Managers (PMs) to use smaller tests to evaluate whether their product bets are viable, to discover more while spending less to deliver
- Prioritising technical debt as well as customer value
- Pulling engineers closer to customers, discovery, and aligning their success with business strategy
- Coached a team to reduce its average cycle time to 1/6th in three months by helping them define problems, call out complexity and scope, and minimise waste
- Doubled a team’s release cadence after experimenting with visual data to validate different WIP limits
Building great teams & transformational leadership
- Clarifying product strategy, checking consistency and alignment
- Facilitating OKR formulation and follow through
- Thriving with new team cultures
- Teaching and coaching
- Offering frameworks for discovery, experimentation and teamwork
- Visualising the discovery process with the Product Trio
- Role modelling compassionate curiosity; direct but kind communication
- Coaching PMs and Product Owners (POs) on story writing, leadership, visualisation and stakeholder collaboration
- Reviving Agile and Product chapters/craft forums
- Introducing trust-building exercises, team agreements, mediating disputes, clarifying objectives
- Facilitating team-work and shared vision across roles (dev, UX, content, customer service, product, and more)
- Highlighting what teams need, sharing frequent feedback with leaders to help them empower their people
Facilitating problem solving
- Uncovering reality with data, visualising the impact
- Highlighting systemic blockers, gatekeepers and bottlenecks: e.g. helping POs take ownership over connecting with customers
- Enabling Product roles to collaborate and close product strategy gaps
- Designing and facilitating team and project kick offs
- Uncovering cross-team conflict based on team topologies, strategy, alignment, and clear purpose, showing leaders where to focus
- Creating original retrospectives, then growing the competence in others
- Dispute resolution, interest-based negotiation, courageous conversations
- Coaching leaders to bring their teams together to solve shared, department level problems
Fostering growth mindset & culture
- Advocating agile and lean mindset daily while embedded in multiple product teams
- Forming relationships with managers, Directors, and VPs; providing feedback on culture and self organisation
- Coaching collaboration
- Creating blogs, company talks, agile graduate training, agile learning mini-sessions on deeper questions (e.g. dual track, WIP limits, batch size)
- Pursuing my own development so I am a thoughtful and available leader
Where I’ve made a difference
Agile Coach – Cambio, Oct-21 – Feb-22
I shared results from the Dandy People 9 Dimension analysis, working with the CTO to identify where issues existed, and which to act on first. I gathered the LACE team together to identify short, mid and long term goals, metrics to identify if we achieved them, and activities to move the needle. The first goal addressed psychological safety, so I co-authored several blog posts, hosted a discussion with managers, and our survey results showed an increase in awareness, understanding, and confidence in tools to support psychological safety. I also focused on transformational leadership, presenting to the LT, creating material for all managers to anticipate a leadership program, finalised material for the pilot of the program, and hosted a short series of “leadership brunches” to inspire and connect leaders in the organisation to learn from each other, whether in Sweden or Sri Lanka. Cambio is a leading supplier of e-health products and services in the Nordics.
Agile Coach – Mentimeter, Apr-21 – Oct-21
I built agile capabilities with PMs and teams to enable value driven deliveries and grow high performing teams. My impact spanned different value streams in product, across design and engineering, identified alignment opportunities and boosted strategy. I coached teams through discovery and experimentation processes, and aligned role responsibilities, delivery frameworks, cross-team expectations and the balance of collaborative autonomy. I shifted mindsets and capabilities from unclear, chaotic work habits to clear roles, processes, and expectations; from fixed, large scope plans to an ability to slice, deliver, test and learn faster. I engaged teams in co-creating solid, fit-for-purpose OKRs and habits to support their success. Mentimeter is a Swedish startup that is rapidly scaling and expanding internationally.
Agile Coach – Tele2, Dec-19 – Mar-21
I coached multiple departments; created and facilitated workshops on OKRs and product vision across departments and roles; prepared and facilitated Big Room Planning with hundreds of participants; started and grew the PO Chapter, revamped the Agile Chapter; aligned POs, coaches and managers across departments; helped onboard a department into the biggest IT program’s process, adding improvements; created and delivered trainings on better remote meetings, roles, and feedback. Tele2 is a Swedish telecommunications company in Stockholm.
Agile Team Coach – Xero, Mar-18 – Sep-19
With teams and leaders across many product areas, I engaged new teams quickly, assisted with process, coached POs, PMs and Development Managers, unblocked their access to customers, uncovered wastes in the “fuzzy frontend” of product strategy, facilitated discovery workshops, ran interactive education sessions, wrote blogs, collaborated and illustrated guidance on product discovery in practice, lead teams through trust building, guided improvement beyond the sprint cycle, helped uncover issues, guided clarity, referred to as a rock for teams through uncertainty and stress. Xero is an international cloud-based accounting software.
Scrum Master & Business Analyst – Trade Me, Feb -17 – Mar-18
I facilitated ceremonies and workshops such as a new team charter, writing user stories, breaking work into slices, grooming, retrospectives (per sprint and higher level), kick off sessions for new projects involving several teams, a lot of rapid learning. Trade Me is New Zealand’s largest e-commerce site with 60% of the country’s web traffic.
Investigator, Trust and Safety; previously TAS Officer – Trade Me,
Dec 14-March 18
Records Officer – New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade,
Sept 11-Dec 14
Education and Certifications
Formal agile training
CSPO Certification – 2019
Jeff Patton’s Passionate Product Ownership workshop (incl. PO certification)
ICAgile Certified Professional – 2017
Lynne Cazaly’s Visual Facilitation & Leader as Facilitator workshop
ICAgile Fundamentals Course – 2017
Broader Education
- Enrolled barrister/solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand
- PEACE Ethical Investigative Interviewing (NZ Police)
- Bachelor of Laws (LLB) Victoria University of Wellington
- B.Sc. Political Science (Honors) Arizona State University
- Spanish Minor, International Studies Certificate
- Successfully defended honours thesis via the Community Action Research Experience
Community presentations and writing
- Presented Agile 101 for Master of Business Analysis students at Victoria University (Nov 2018)
- Create Camp mentoring 2018, and coaching mentors 2019. I facilitated story mapping, mini-Scrum ceremonies, and helped prioritise teamwork, intro to Agile.
- Connect to peers at Meetups for agile, product, coaching, and leadership
- Medium: “If you can clean, you can Lean” for lean product management https://devblog.xero.com/if-you-can-clean-you-can-lean-f0f398d41b45
- Medium: “Coaching with Consent” https://medium.com/@rachael.e.gibb/coaching-with-consent-collaborating-with-your-new-team-to-build-transparent-influence-84a8f007167c
Languages
English – Native
Swedish – Beginner
Spanish – Intermediate
