Sandy Mamoli
Sandy is one of NZ's leading Agile coaches, a force of positive energy, and former Olympic athlete. She works with leaders and teams, guiding them towards high performance with an approach that is hands-on, no-nonsense and steeped in Agile. She’s the co-author of “Creating Great Teams – How Self-Selection Lets People Excel”. Sandy is a sought after presenter and international keynote speaker and a member of the Global Agile Alliance Board. She is a high-achieving, goal-driven, smart human who is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, really into CrossFit.
Where it all began
Sandy started her career as a professional athlete playing handball. In addition to playing in the European leagues, she also represented her home country of Austria at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
After her highly successful sporting career, Sandy got her masters degree in Natural Language Processing and went on to a technical role at Sony Ericsson. With a focus on sysadmin and telco, she honed an agile, team based approach to work as early as 2003, all whilst zooming around Copenhagen, Stockholm and Amsterdam.
Sandy's third career as an Agile Coach began after moving to New Zealand in 2007 when she co-founded Nomad8 and started working with companies to inject her own unique flavour and style of Agile.
Sandy has coached and consulted to a range of impressive companies like Trade Me, Snapper and Southern Cross Health. Her repertoire includes coaching technical teams, executive teams and whole organisations. In addition to every flavour of agile you can imagine she has coached teams and companies on things like Holocracy, high performance teams and Business Agility.
What she does
Sandy is one of NZ's leading Agile coaches and is accredited by ICAgile to teach Agile Team Facilitator, Product Ownership and Leadership in an Agile Context training. She has delivered literally hundreds of highly successful training courses across New Zealand.
Sandy has been a keynote speaker at some of the biggest Agile (and non-Agile!) conferences in the world. She has delivered the keynote address at Agile Montreal, Agile Brazil and is a constant feature at Agile Australia and the Agile Alliance conferences in the US.
In 2015 she authored her first book 'Creating Great Teams', co-authored with her Nomad8 colleague David Mole on the subject of high performing Agile teams and self-selection.
Since 2023 she has served as a member on the international Agile Alliance board.
Articles by Sandy
Join Vitaliy Lyoshin and me in this podcast episode we explore the world of high-performing agile teams! We discuss how teams can achieve high performance and success through behaviours, shared history, and self-selection. Here are some key takeaways: ✔️Agile teams thrive on a shared goal, mutual de...
The Reimagining Agile workshop at JAFAC was a remarkable event where the New Zealand Agile community came together to discuss, problem-solve, and envision the future of agile. Our session was framed around the idea of Reimagining Agile, emphasizing that a single document can no longer effectively re...
We ask our leaders for their trust, support and empathy – and so we should. We rightfully demand to be treated like responsible adults. But are we behaving as such?...
After my recent talk at Øredev in Malmö 🇸🇪 "Are you Drowning your Autonomy in Good Intentions" Remote:af's Tony Ponton and I had a brilliant conversation on @talkingremote's live chat. We talk about learned helplessness and broken relationships between leaders and people. We talk ab...
With the rapid pace of transformation in technology and work culture, it's challenging to predict what the future holds. It's clear, though, that new ways of working are emerging and they're here to stay. This workshop, based on Jim Highsmith's book "Wild West to Agile", attempts to do exactly that....
Back in 2003, when I first dipped my toes into the world of Agile, I had no idea that it would become such an integral part of my life. Two decades later, my passion for Agile ways of working hasn't waned; it's only grown stronger....
I had the great pleasure to talk to Tony Ponton in this episode of Remote:af. Tony is a former radio host and it shows! In this episode, I talk about my background as a professional athlete and software developer, and how comparing my experience as a team athlete with individual sports such as Cros...
Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson from the No Nonsense Agile Podcast in a conversation with Sandy Mamoli about building great teams: Why do some teams perform well and others perform poorly? The importance of skill, trust, respect, collaboration common purpose, constructive feedback and continuo...
The problem: It’s so boring! Someone joins the team: Maybe they come from another area of the business or maybe you just hired them. They might have worked agile in a previous job or they might have no idea what that means. Anyway you, the agile coach, now have to bring them up to speed so they are...
Self-Selection: The ultimate booster of autonomy and engagement Imagine, just for a moment, that I walked into your organisation and asked everyone to down tools for a day and get into teams of their choosing. That I asked everyone to choose who they wanted to work with and what they wanted to work...
At age 15 I found myself part of a team I had nothing in common with: people were at least 10 years older, they were a lot better at playing handball and we had nothing in common except for a love of the game. I felt very alone and inadequate, and just tried to hang in there practicing harder than I...
Why is it that we are still obsessed with the performance of the individual in our modern team-based organisations? Shouldn’t we measure and compare teams instead? Not for the sake of competing, but to learn from each other....
1. What is self-selection? Self-selection is a way of letting people choose which team to work in. It is a facilitated process of letting people self-organize into small, cross-functional teams. It is the fastest and most efficient way to form stable teams and is based on a belief that people are at...
SPaMCAST features Tom Cagley's interview with Sandy Mamoli. We talked about teams and the book she co-authored, Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel. Sandy’s unique perspective as a world-class athlete and Agile Coach allows her to deliver options about forming teams you didn’t...
“How do I know which team to choose and what guidelines I should apply?” “How do we make sure people make good choices, not just for themselves but for all of us?” These are the two most common questions managers and team members ask before any self-selection event. This post will provide guideline...
The performance of an individual is much less important than you think it is. The way we measure, assess, evaluate and reward individual performance is no longer relevant in the modern workplace. We need to look at different behaviours and skills and instead consider the performance of the team. W...
How Travelstart used remote self-selection to create distributed teamsOnly five months after creating cross-functional teams Travelstart, a South African travel booking website, had a change in strategy and needed to rethink their team structure. From previous hackathons the company had experience w...
"Trusting people to choose who to work with and what to work on creates not only great teams but also great organisations. I have run self-selections since 2013 and have some stories to tell." In her keynote at Agile Tour Montreal Sandy Mamoli explores the idea of self-selection. Can it improve prod...
At Agile 2019 I shared 7 lessons I have learned during an Olympic career that have helped me be successful in business and life. In the world of professional sports innovation, resilience and rapid learning are everything! In this very personal talk I share key learnings from my professional and Ol...
This is the story of introducing Holacracy at Snapper, a New Zealand tech company, whose CTO gave Sandy a one-line instruction: “I’d like you to make it happen.” Watch it here....
In this talk at the Business Agility Conference in Vienna Sandy Mamoli explores the idea of self-selection. Can it improve productivity and create happier teams? Sandy talks about her personal experience after more than five years of running Self-Selection teams in small and large organisations all...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In this episode Sandy Mamoli talks to Simon Pound about her book Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel and an Olympic career that has taught her how to thrive in business....
Holacracy has great mechanisms to deal with governance and tactical issues. But what about the human side? What about relationships? What about our personal interactions in the workplace? Many have criticised Holacracy for not being complete, for being a system that only deals with the work and not...
The fastest and most efficient way to form stable agile teams is to let people choose their own team. This was a scary prospect when we in 2013 first considered handing over the decision making responsibility to the people affected. Fast-forward six years and self-selection has had a profound effect...
Agile FM - Sandy Mamoli on Self-Selection In this episode, Joe Krebs and I explore the topics of self-selection, self-organization and why this is so important for the culture of modern companies....
Language We struggled a lot with the strange words and the weird legalese language. We decided to stick with it though because we realised that new concepts need new words. Otherwise we would impede learning. We did this in a way that we could still make fun of it though. This is part three of thr...
Roles Figuring out all the roles and how we would work with them was lot of work to define and incredibly tedious to figure out - but ultimately well worth it. It provided some valuable insights into what our team was actually doing - an unanticipated side benefit! This is part two of three of my a...
For the upcoming Business Agility conference in New York Sandy has been interviewed for AgileAmped's Business Agility series. Sandy sat down with Agile Amped to explain Holacracy – a way to create a truly self-organizing organization – and shares examples of it in action. This episode of Agile Amped...
Recently a friend was considering introducing Holacracy in his company. He asked me what my thoughts were and while I was tempted to run screaming from the room in the same way you want to flee to a remote island when your mum buys a new PC, instead I blinked, swallowed, and we talked through my exp...
Attending Agile Australia has always been a highlight of my year, and this year was extra special because I finally got the opportunity to keynote the conference. It only took me 10 years (since I first set myself that goal), but hey, lifetime achievement unlocked!...