Sam Laing

Sam Laing

Sam wants people to be happy and productive at work. Working with purpose and meaning and joy. From starting out as a software developer, she now uses and enthuses about agile with many different industries and teams. A regular speaker at international agile conferences, she has co-authored a number of books on agile and Scrum. She is mildly obsessed with her dogs.

Contact Sam

Articles by samlaing

Minimalist Agile

Mar 16, 2021

I have been an agile practitioner for a while now and every year I learn new things and add practices and ideas to my tool belt. I have hundreds of these. The agile alliance has this Subway map of practices and I know there are MANY more out there.... continue reading

Making Work Visible - Exposing time theft!

Nov 19, 2019

Do you ever get to the end of a day, week, or month and wonder where all that time went? What did you do? What did you achieve? Why do you feel so exhausted and yet your to-do list looks just as long, if not longer? Research has shown that people regularly take on more work than they are capable of.... continue reading

Growth Maps

Nov 05, 2019

I have been working for many years now. Around 20. And I have always wanted a manager who really cared about my learning as much as I did. For most of this time, I was just provided with courses and/or books that I wanted.. Now as a coach I hear regularly from managers that they want workers that ar... continue reading

A personal story with an agile thread

Oct 07, 2019

A few weeks ago I did my first solo keynote at Agile Prague; “Being Curious about YOU”. I have been giving talks and workshops at large agile conferences since 2011, but this one was different. This wasn’t about some agile technique, this was about me, and the story was not a “sunshine and rainbows”... continue reading

Agile2019: The Curious case of You

Aug 07, 2019

At Agile2019 I presented a workshop on the Self Care track called The Curious Case of You. This workshop was all about listening to the inner you and discovering what your future might look like without the pressures of what others or society might think you future should look like. The slides wont... continue reading

Self-care at Agile2019

Jul 22, 2019

In a few weeks I will be jetting off to Agile2019 in WashingtonDC. I am the track chair for the Self-Care track and so I was wondering about how to care for myself during the conference. I have over the last 9 years come up with tricks for dealing with this very large conference. For most of us just... continue reading