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.
Contact SandySandy 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.
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.
Aug 08, 2019
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... continue reading
Aug 08, 2019
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.... continue reading
Jul 17, 2019
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... continue reading
Jul 09, 2019
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.... continue reading
Jun 13, 2019
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... continue reading
May 27, 2019
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... continue reading
Mar 28, 2019
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.... continue reading
Mar 21, 2019
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... continue reading
Mar 11, 2019
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... continue reading
Mar 10, 2019
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... continue reading
Mar 04, 2019
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... continue reading
Feb 06, 2019
We have run Squad Self-Selection for two quarters in a row within ICONIC Tech and it has been wildly successful (99% of our staff either love it (77%), or like it (22%)). Our process included about 30 people and 5 Squads. We wanted to share our experience in the hopes of inspiring other organisation... continue reading
Oct 18, 2018
Sandy caught up with Kristin Andersson, Agile coach at LIC to learn how Self-selection has enabled their people to become high performing teams. LIC is an agri-tech co-operative that empowers farmers through the delivery of superior genetics and technology. They needed to redesign their existing tea... continue reading
Dec 05, 2017
How we created a networked organisation 5 Key take-aways Holacracy provides radical transparency and timely decision making at the right level. Decision making by consent is awesome! The freedom, autonomy and responsibility to achieve a clear purpose enables self-organisation. Holacracy will amplif... continue reading
Aug 30, 2017
Empathy is a good thing and understanding what your colleagues actually do can be a very useful boost to collaboration. When we work in cross-functional teams or with people from other parts of the organisation it is helpful to get an understanding of what they do, how they can contribute and what w... continue reading
Jul 02, 2017
I often teach Agile to people who have nothing to do with software development, such as leadership teams or organisations that operate entirely outside of the digital world. In this context I only teach the Modern Agile values (read more about the modern agile movement at modernagile.org).... continue reading
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