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 15, 2013
... let teams self-select! At Trade Me we’re in the process of getting everyone into small, cross-functional teams (squads) that will persist over time and across projects. Up until last week we had six established squads and the rollout had been purposefully slow and controlled. Now we felt there... continue reading
Sept 22, 2013
Why your daily standup should be driven by a daily goal Let’s face it, the daily standup can be a boring affair. I’m not talking about abominations with 16 people or half-hour long status reporting meetings. I’m talking about the ones that are kind of okay and adhere to the rules but nonetheless are... continue reading
Sept 02, 2013
5 things that happen when you let ‘em loose ... Last Friday we had Fedex day at Trade Me. The aim of a FedEx Day is to complete something deliverable within a 24 hour period, i.e. to go from idea to a shippable product within a day. It was fun, lots of great projects saw the light of day and I enjoy... continue reading
Aug 05, 2013
What is a premortem? A premortem is a project postmortem that’s run before a project. During a postmortem people analyse and discuss what went wrong, what went well and what could be improved. While postmortems are very useful the problem is that by the time we run them the project is usually over a... continue reading
Jul 23, 2013
Hi, my name is Simon and I am a Project Manager at Trade Me. Sandy kindly asked me to contribute to her blog, and I consider it a great honour. Below is my story about how we embraced Agile to inject magic into our project. As a Project Manager I am keenly aware that most projects fail and that’s a... continue reading
Jul 01, 2013
What are ground rules? Ground rules are a list of behaviours and rules a squad decide are useful for working together as a team in a productive and respectful way. A list of ground rules is an incredibly useful tool for guiding group behaviour. They are part of establishing an environment where peo... continue reading
Jun 22, 2013
Last week Jan, Mike, Anthony and I were at Agile Australia in Sydney and had an incredibly good time. The conference turned Twitter handles into people, exposed me to TimTam slams, and taught me that Beyond Budgeting is not a boring accounting thing but a riveting management philosophy. I presented... continue reading
Apr 25, 2013
Many novice teams find it difficult to strike the balance between too much and too little detail when writing user stories. User stories often start their lives as big statements of intent with lots of unknowns and that’s okay. For something that’s not going to be developed in the near future it mak... continue reading
Feb 11, 2013
When we introduced Scrum and Kanban to our teams the most loved addition to our way of working were visual workspaces. Our shared visual workspace We found it tremendously helpful to make our tasks visible though post-it notes, to visualise our workflow and to make sure that we didn't do too many... continue reading
Jan 23, 2013
Every other week I have a geek and gossip breakfast with fellow Agile coach Nathan from Boost New Media. Last time he told me that at Boost they had replaced the word “Scrum Master” with “Agile coach”. It makes complete sense: The most important part of the Scrum Master role is coaching. Also, many... continue reading
Jan 04, 2013
It is the time of year for winding down and reflecting on things before heading off to the beach for some BBQ-ing, drinking of things and general relaxing. So we wanted to thank you for your custom and support for 2012, wish you all the best for 2013 and share some of our reflections (we can share d... continue reading
Sept 20, 2012
A while ago I wrote about Personal Kanban at Snapper. Personal Kanban, or KanbanFor1 as we call it, has supported Snapper’s Agile adoption and has proven an excellent training ground for the team to develop good habits and behaviours. As in all Agile adoptions the delivery team aren’t the only ones... continue reading
Aug 05, 2012
If you’re doing it right an Agile and Lean adoption requires organisational change. Organisational change is often difficult because of the many layers and dependencies and the sheer number of people involved. At my current client organisational change involves upper and middle management, developm... continue reading
Jul 13, 2012
Since my coaching friend Mike Lowery described his experience at Agile 2006 as a life-changing event I really wanted to go to this conference. This year after having been part of Esther Derby and Geoff Watt's submission review team for the conference's coaching stage I decided that I needed to make... continue reading
Jun 25, 2012
I really like Jonathan Rasmussen’s project inception deck as a simple, quick and cut-to-the-chase way of kicking off projects. Overall, I pretty much stick to Jonathan’s content and flow, but sometimes, I use a press release exercise instead of a product box. The idea of refining a product vision th... continue reading
May 16, 2012
My client, a New Zealand government department, is in the process of introducing Agile-Lean. They are currently in a trial phase to see if it is for them and during the early stages they'd like to run Agile and non-Agile projects in parallel. Fair enough, but how to choose whether a project should... continue reading
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