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.
Oct 01, 2015
Are you tired of capturing ideas and experiments that come out of your retrospectives only to forget about them after a couple of days? Do your improvement ideas get lost in waves of sticky-notes and hand drawn diagrams? Try idea balloons! Idea balloons are a way of keeping your ideas and agreements... continue reading
Jul 29, 2015
A problem we were facing recently was that our teams perceived their own progress as not being fast enough and were developing a sense that they were not performing well. Sometimes it is useful to know how productive we are as an organisation and how our teams compare to teams in other companies. A... continue reading
Jun 23, 2015
Self-selection helps Agile teams pick themselves. And it’s spreading: Since we shared our Self-Selection kit in May 2014 we have heard about successful Self-Selection events from companies from all over the world. Read our interview with MYOB’s Simon Bristow and Alex Barreto, and find out how they m... continue reading
May 04, 2015
Urban dictionary: rat-hole To digress in an extensive way. To divert the conversation to a topic that is not only unrelated to the topic at hand, but a topic that will likely have no immediate resolution either. As a facilitator of a group discussion, a conversation or a workshop session it is impor... continue reading
Mar 29, 2015
Recently, someone from the small but perfectly shaped nation of Iceland asked me the following question: “When watching your InfoQ talk on portfolio Kanban I noticed that you talked about measuring autonomy, mastery, and purpose as they are defined by Daniel Pink. I have been searching the web for a... continue reading
Mar 19, 2015
This is a sample agenda for a sprint planning meeting. Depending on your context you will have to change the details, just make sure the outcomes stay the same. Meeting purpose: Plan and prepare for the upcoming sprint Meeting duration: ca. 1 hour for a 2 week sprint (it will be less if you’re an ex... continue reading
Mar 04, 2015
Inspired by our squadification event, Australia Post set out to try self-selection for themselves. 60 people were asked to figure out who should be in which team and choose who they wanted to work with. Read our interview with Andy Kelk, Australia Post's Head of Technology for Digital Mailbox, who m... continue reading
Jan 22, 2015
Even with high performing teams sometimes there are common themes coming up again and again in each retrospective. Much like a tight spot in a muscle that keeps lingering around (until we get a good massage) those issues keep coming back until we pay them enough attention to make them disappear. Use... continue reading
Nov 15, 2014
Doing too many things at once can slow down an entire organisation. As every successful organisation will have more great ideas than they have capacity to build, it is tempting to start too many of them at the same time. However, too many projects in progress will slow down delivery of each and ever... continue reading
Oct 27, 2014
It can be easy to forget what a Product Owner or Scrum Master actually do. A poster with a role description can come in handy so, based on popular demand, here are the beautifully designed ones we use at Trade Me. Download the pdf version here. Download the pdf version here. I hope they'll look a... continue reading
Aug 20, 2014
My goal for the next couple of years is to become an awesome public speaker. And here’s why:This is handball, and this is what I used to do. First, on a competitive level from when I was 12 and then, when I grew older, as a professional player representing Austria at the 1992 Olympic Summer Games. W... continue reading
Jul 14, 2014
Let them be in control of the way they work ... After having been though a day of letting people self-organise into squads David Mole, Trade Me's head of projects (and my Agile partner in crime) and I are often being asked how we kicked off the new squads and how we make sure they work in a discipli... continue reading
Jun 03, 2014
... getting more stuff done At Trade Me we want to measure the overall health of Tech (that’s our team of 125 designers, developers, testers, BAs, and Squad Masters) to identify trends and to know if we are getting better (or worse!). We know that when we measure something it is a strong way of sayi... continue reading
May 12, 2014
This free Self-Selection pocket guide is a quick guide to Self-Selection. Use these handy checklists for preparing and running self-selection events of 20-200 people. It can be used as a stand-along guide or as a companion to the book “Creating Great Teams - How Self- Selection Lets People Excel” by... continue reading
Feb 21, 2014
Spotify's whitepaper on how to structure an organisation with Agile tribes, squads, chapters and guilds has been the most inspiring and interesting idea to come out of the Agile scene in the past three years. For anyone who has read the excellent paper we have created a one page infographic on how i... continue reading
Jan 11, 2014
Organisations get the best results when people can choose what they work on and who they work with. In that spirit we decided to let people self-organise into small, cross-functional teams called squads. Up until last week we had six established squads within two tribes the rollout had been purposef... continue reading
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