Poonam Zantye is a Business Transformation leader with more than 17 years’ experience delivering long-term business value by addressing strategic organizational challenges and opportunities. She is a versatile leader with a passion for problem solving and driving impact. She is a strong believer in the power of business to bring about social change.

As a Product Leader at Walmart, she is responsible for driving digital transformation for merchants across the organization’s global footprint. She has played an integral role in driving Walmart’s data maturity strategy. At BMO Harris Bank, Poonam was instrumental in setting up a business transformation office and leading multiple strategic initiatives for the bank.

Previously, in her role as a consulting and strategy leader at companies such as Deloitte, Harley-Davidson, Prudential, and Wipro, she advised companies on strategy development, operational excellence, organization design and change management.

Poonam is a lifelong learner, with a degree in Engineering and MBAs from the University of Michigan and the Indian Institute of Management. Additionally, she has multiple certifications in product management, agile program management and innovation from Stanford and Cornell universities. She currently resides in Bentonville, Arkansas with her husband and 4-year-old daughter.

Cansel believes goal achieving doesn’t need to feel like a war to fight but like an adventurous journey.

As Business Coach specialised in OKR she guides individuals, teams and organisations on the journey to their goals. For over 12 years she has been working in different roles in Product, Project, Portfolio Management and Agile Organisational Development.

Since 2016 she practices Objectives and Key Results (OKR) because she believes it covers the most important aspects of Business Agility such as alignment around a shared vision, development and execution the right strategy, focusing on things that matter and collaborate around measurable outcomes to learn and adapt along the way.

Michal is an experienced Agile coach, Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) and Professional Scrum with Kanban Trainer (PSK) by scrum.org.

Michal has over 15 years of experience in the IT and software development industries. She served in wide range of professional and managerial positions, among them: Building wide scale global production environments, managing QA groups and leading Agile transformations in various software organizations.

Michal’s experience both in the IT production world and in software development contributes to her wide and holistic perspective when implementing Agile transformations. While training and coaching teams for Agile mindset, she focuses also on impacting cross organization agile culture.

Michal is married with 4 kids and a dog, likes to run and travel.

Chief Customer Experience Officer devoted to improving the human experience and empowering women in tech

Melissa has worked in the tech industry for over 20 years in roles ranging from Junior Software Engineer to her current role as the Chief Customer Experience Officer at addapptation.

She holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire, an executive certification in Management and Leadership from MIT and a SAFe Program Consultant (SPC4) certification. Always driven by her passion to have a positive impact on the decline of women in STEM education and careers, she has volunteered with organizations around the world including ChickTech, Everwise, WITI, NH Tech Alliance, Microsoft DigiGirlz, wiseHer and AnitaB.org.

This passion led her to co-found Diversify Thinking, an initiative focused on moving inclusion from conversation to action. Melissa organizes mentoring programs and creates opportunities for collaboration among diverse thinkers through their Rise & Diversify Event Series.

Experienced Technical Manager skilled in Android application development, Full-stack development, Cloud-based SAAS solutions, little bit of blockchain.

Certified technical manager/scrum master with expertise in handling cross geo teams.

A blockchain and ML enthusiast with awards in worldwide hackathons in Blockchain.

Currently transforming ideas to products in retail and fintech.

Love to learn about people and how we as a manager can lend them a hand to grow.

Catherine Kraus is a Scrum Master/ Agile Coach who is passionate about creating an environment where individuals and teams have the space to grow, deliver awesome products, and achieve happiness in the process.

Catherine has 15+ years’ experience leading IT projects and coaching teams in digital marketing, HR and Finance. She currently works as a scaled agile (SAFe 5) Scrum Master at Siemens Healthineers, located in Erlangen, Germany.

As a leadership coach (certified with ICF PCC and Co-Active CPCC credentials), Catherine empowers others to build on their natural abilities and strengths.

Catherine wants to create positive change for women in the workplace. In addition to coaching agile teams, she also coaches professional women inside and outside her organisation on career and personal development.

Sophie studied mathematics at university which did not go as planned. She finished with a diploma nonetheless.

By serendipity she stumbled into agile testing – and has never looked back.

She now works happily as an agile tester at cronn GmbH, a Bonn based IT company, where she specializes in test automation using Karate DSL. Please do not challenge her to a physical karate duel though – she is much more of a dancer than a fighter. No stranger to the universe’s gut punches, she is passionate about mental health, self-care and improving awareness and communication.

Nele Uhlemann is an associated Developer Advocate at Camunda.

Her passion is helping the open source community use and understand Camunda’s technologies and build a bridge between business and technical users to leverage the full potential of Business Process Management.

Before Nele worked as a consultant at Camunda, leading workshops with developers and business users. Therefore, she understands the need to find a common language to enable agility in both domains.

Nele has a background in social science and during her studies she became aware of how important Systems and Software are for our future. In order to understand them she decided to learn how to code. That makes her a hybrid interested in social topics and driven by technology.

Garima Gujral is serving as a Taxonomist at Walmart Global Tech, responsible for building, maintaining, and governing product taxonomies to power product classification, enrichment, and platform scalability.

Garima is passionate about improving taxonomical structures, metadata, controlled vocabularies as well as the processes to meet end-user needs. She was awarded a gold medal for Masters of Library and Information Science (2018-20 batch) at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India.

She has authored over 30 publications in multidisciplinary domains such as health informatics, knowledge management, library and information science, digital divide, and scientometrics.

And has been associated with a diverse range of organizations including the Ministry of Women and Child Development (Government of India), Illumine Knowledge Resources, Indian Institute of Public Administration, Breakthrough India.

She underwent training at Academic Resource Centre, Digital Learning Park at Mahasarakham University, Thailand on technical operations in knowledge management.

Garima holds the vision of “Reaching the Unreached” through launching a series of concrete and transformative actions to achieve irreversible progress towards gender equality.

Sindhu is a Senior Technical Writer at Walmart Labs India. She helps companies, and teams build user-friendly and catchy documentation for their software products, applications, solutions, and business processes to accelerate adoption, and improve user engagement.

Her working principle is: Collaborate, write, and rewrite until I get it right!

She started her career in the software Industry way back in 2003 and has had an exciting journey since then. With multiple roles and resignations, she has always changed gears based on her priorities but never gave up on her passion. “Not very ambitious yet I love what I do” is her mantra. She is super excited to share her story of always being positive as she embraces all roles that come her way.

I’m Eleftheria, no one can really pronounce or remember my name so you can just call me Elef 🙂

As soon as I saw this conference I really wanted to take part in it. Women can do everything and we need more women in tech!

I currently work as a Community Manager at Hashnode(https://hashnode.com) and freelancing as a developer and UX researcher.

In my free time, I create YouTube videos about being a better developer/designer, improving your career as well as tutorials and “how-to”. I also spent quite a few of my time on social media, connecting with people, exchanging ideas, and helping each other to grow and learn faster.

Since I work daily and for a lot of hours I also try to stay active as much as possible, I love working out, going for long walks in nature or spending quality time with friends.

Meena is Agile Coach at Aire, a pioneering data and technology startup.

Starting her career as a Software Engineer in 2003, Meena’s work spanned multiple divisions and geographies, sparking an early fascination in the neuroscience behind team dynamics.

A self-confessed sceptic to Agile initially, she first discovered the discipline over ten years ago.

Now passionate about how Agile brings people and teams together, Meena is particularly interested in how its principles can be extended across whole businesses, other than product development.

She is an avid learner and environmentalist.

Rozemarijn Geelen Non-verbal behaviour specialist at Theater in Maatpak Rozemarijn is an experience non-verbal behaviour specialist.

With her company ‘Theater in Maatpak’ (Theatre for business) Rozemarijn supports you to use authentic non-verbal behaviour to boost your personal impact. Non-verbal behaviour is an important aspect to make your agile work successful both in an online and offline environment.

With a background in theatre Rozemarijn helps to bring the agile framework to life. Using non-verbal behaviour, she will give you the insight in how to recognize behaviour, how to make your own behaviour impactful and how to stay flexible in an agile environment.

Making a positive impact whilst enjoying your work begins with making strong connections. Non-verbal behaviour will allow you make that personal connection. People thrive in a safe and positive environment and with non-verbal behaviour you can create that environment.

When you are able to recognize someone’s non-verbal behaviour it will become easier to communicate and adjust your working strategies when necessary. When you are able to use your own non-verbal behaviour consciously you can make a positive impact.

I am completely taken by Scrum since I first got to know it at the transition to working Agile at Essent, facilitated by Xebia, 2010. Before experiencing the power of Scrum I worked at several traditional waterfall projects.
During the transition at Essent I started as an Agile Support Officer and after that became a Scrum Master, Scrum Master for the Scrum Masters/Agile/Scrum Coach, supporting the Scrum Master, Developers and Product Owner.

Since then I have been a Scrum Master coaching several Scrum Masters, Scrum teams and their surroundings at Wegener Media, CRV, Rabobank, CBS, Europeesche Verzekeringen, ING Commercial Banking, Portbase, Philips, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, APG, Vodafone Ziggo, Jumbo, Triodos and Unilever.
I like to share my knowledge and love teaching so I also have been organizing knowledge sessions for trainees, colleagues and management for the companies I've worked at. To inspire young people for working with Scrum I also have given several guest lectures at the Hogeschool Zuyd and the HAN.

Currently I am working as an Agile trainer at Xebia Academy, where I fully focus on sharing knowledge; teaching, conferences, developing and improving of trainings and trainers.
As a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org I give Professional Scrum trainings like the PSM and PSPO. I am also certified to teach the ‘Training From the Back of the Room' and co-created the Virtual Edition of it with Sharon Bowman. My trainings are always filled with brain based learning activities, both in the online as the physical trainings. In my trainings I use the experience I have gained from working in the Agile domain for 10 years.

Beyond a vocation, I would speak of passion and conviction: how to give envy to people to want to develop together the collective intelligence and no longer individualism?

As an Agile coach, I prefer, on the one hand, taking the time to put myself in the place of the target population, for designing the best path of the person coached and for proposing the most appropriate coaching approach (#coachingexperience). And on the other hand, I’m an adept of the “learning by doing” philosophy: I believe with certainty that only practice and experience are the keys of mindset evolution…

Jenn Donahue PhD is a civil engineer and US Navy Captain who works on large scale, high profile geotechnical projects.

Over her 25-year military career, Jenn has built a bridge across the Euphrates River in the midst of the Iraq war, commanded an 800-personnel Battalion in Afghanistan, and constructed combat outposts in the middle of deserts filled with insurgents.

Jenn has led earthquake and tsunami reconnaissance missions in places like Samoa and Japan; designed the seismic plans for a bridge over the Panama Canal; and built roads in the coldest climes of Ketchikan.

Along the way she mentored scores of young leaders and facing down bullies in her own command structure.

Today Jenn runs JL Donahue Engineering. She also lectures at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

Jenn is working on her first book, Go Do Great Things: Ditch Your Camouflage and Become a Genuine Leader.

Lynn has embraced change throughout her career. After achieving a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, cum laude, at Boston University, she continued her education at the University of Buffalo Law School.

Lynn is a licensed attorney in New York State but chose to pursue other opportunities. The chance to build a new hospital foundation emerged and her fundraising career was born. After 16 years building that foundation, she went on to a large community foundation assisting donors to become the architect of their legacy. Lynn realized she missed the gratification of local philanthropy in her community and assisting the needs of another hospital foundation.

Today, she has pivoted to speak to groups of all sizes to share experiences and help people rise above the chaos. Lynn loves to share stories about great leaders and toxic bosses. Lynn loves spending time with her family, traveling, antique hunting and playing bananagrams.

Marian Maas has published no books and is not famous for anything.

Why listen to Marians talks? Because she tells a good story, guaranteed to be inspiring, out of the box and fun to listen to. So who is this woman?

Well… She’s a former student of two art schools, two universities and one business school. She’s even an alumni at some of them, but more importantly: she learned a lot everywhere she went and met interesting people.

Marian is Head of Delivery at Worth Internet Systems, where she’s a servant leader to a bunch of scrum masters and agile delivery managers. Her colleagues know her to speak her mind, find solutions and make notes of everything. The notes are not just for work, but also for her passion: writing stories.

Marian is a keen observer of the world around her, because it’s a constant feed of inspiration for more bizarre, dramatic and strange stories. Next to her job and her passion for writing, she’s the proud inhabitant of a messy house, with a garden, a cat, two boys and Menno. There is a lot of love there and music and books and everything that makes life worth living.

I am…

– Promoting a culture of experimentation so that organisations can improve their company wide agility
– aiming to help people individually and organisations as a whole reduce their own suffering –
– building and facilitating great teams, helping them improve every day
– coaching leaders for agility
– a rebel@work
– convinced LeSS is more and that agile is for humans
– also convinced empathy needs to come first
– a capability builder
– finding out ways to deploy “HR” 3.0

After having facilitated and coached a team of Requirements analists ( as a “manager”), adopting agile management (management 3.0) as my leadership style, I am now working as a coach for teams and managers in the agile / adaptive way of working. As a “teacher leader” – which I aim to be – I value learning, so I deem it very important to teach courses (Lean, agile) and to speak at conferences to share my thoughts and experiences.

Core knowledge: Lean / agile Software Development and way of working, solution architecture, mindset changes for succesfull agile transitions, DevOps

My core skills: • Solving complex problems (possibly: business Architecture) in an agile way • Coaching and facilitating (“management” in a bee herding style 🙂 • Consulting (agile, lean of course) • Teaching

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. in Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. She has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.

Jutta has recently co-written (actually pair-written) with John Buck a book on Company-wide Agility. This book focuses on synthesizing Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agility.