#JAFAC Speakers
Brenda Leeuwenberg
Brenda was one of NZ’s early digital pioneers, advocating for opportunities for women in technology and establishing networks throughout the creative sector as the industry carved out space for business and the NZ internet scene was created.
She spent time in Amsterdam where she helped grow fledgling internet agency Media Catalyst to become one of the best in the Netherlands, and led their key accounts including Sony Ericsson global, Speedo and Dunlop as well as heading up the client services team.
Back in NZ in 2007 she started Nomad8 together with Sandy Mamoli. With Nomad8 Brenda has coached many teams and worked alongside leaders to introduce agility and new ways of thinking and working into their business. She has also taken time out to follow her passion for new challenges - she set up and led the development of NZ On Screen, became the Head of Digital and Innovation at NZ On Air and in 2021 she worked with Te Ara Ahunga Ora - the Retirement Commission to create the National Strategy for Financial Capability. Her work spans helping creative agency Springload to rethink how they work, through to helping electricity player Flux focus on their core product.
Nigel Dalton
REA Group's Chief Inventor
Arguably the best title in the world. He leads a small research and development team focused on what will impact the global real estate industry beyond 2020. Using virtual reality, augmented reality, robotics and artificial intelligence, Nigel’s work aims to solve complex problems that improve time, trust and transparency in the property market.
JAFAC 2019 Topic
The Agile Manifesto: yet another Book of Dave?
Will Self’s 2006 sci-fi novel of a far-flung future London, flooded by rising sea levels and subject to cruel and illogical religious law, raises parallels for our own organisational predicaments, as we read far too much into a dozen simple ideas, knocked together by 17 middle-aged white guys, of how to stop software development being consistently shitful. What can we do to avoid history judging us naive and foolish transformation jesters as a result?
Sandy Davey
Founder of ProductSpace
Having been involved in more than 30 digital (hardware and software) products across B2C and B2B, she has a deep love of digital product management. Sandy’s seen the best, and worst, so she mashes agile, lean and new ways of working with passion, humour and pragmatism to help people, teams and organisations optimise the way they bring digital products to market.
JAFAC 2019 Topic
Upon retrospective: the Board went Agile
Someone recently said they’d be dead before Boards and Board of Directors become Agile! But, at CHOICE, we feel optimistic.
A 60 year old social enterprise, CHOICE is largely funded through a digital business that has undergone significant transformation. While much of this transformation has been within CHOICE, it’s been supported by a transformation at Board level. This is a Board that has learned to focus on what the organisation is trying to achieve rather than how, and favours OKRs over traditional business plans. Most of all, it’s a Board committed to continuous learning and improvement.
Board Chair Sandra Davey will talk about their ‘accidental’ Agile journey, and how and why they’re practicing new ways of working. If you’ve ever thought that Boards don’t think about user needs and will never understand Agile, this is the session for you.
LinkedIn
Ruth Brown
Ruth Brown
Last time we heard from Ruth she was the Head of People Experience at TradeMe and her work potentially touched all of you at some point as you bought and sold things. Now out on her own Ruth has been sharing her Agile and UX skills with clients, focusing on research, strategy and leadership. We are very excited to hear her speak at JAFAC for a second time, and even more excited to find out what she’ll speak about!
LinkedIn
Sandy Mamoli
Agile Consultant and Advisor, International Keynote Speaker, Trainer, Author
Sandy is one of New Zealand's leading Agile coaches, a professional speaker and confirmed cross-fit addict. She started her work life as a professional athlete playing handball and now brings together her vast experience of teams and leadership across sport, digital media and business.
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 realised she would eventually break, so 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 introduce and support Agile. Sandy has coached and consulted to a range of companies like Trade Me, Snapper, ASB and Southern Cross Health. Her repertoire includes coaching technical teams, executive teams and whole organisations. In addition to the various and evolving flavours of Agile she has coached teams and companies on Holacracy, high performance teams and Business Agility.
James Magill
General Bigshot for Retail Markets at Genesis Energy
James has a big job that sounds both majorly daunting and exceedingly cool. He is responsible for driving growth across Genesis’ retail portfolio, which involves leading product development, providing brand leadership, developing customer applications, digital architecture and data governance. How could one man do all this? He’s been doing it for a while, working in the energy sector around the world over the past 12 years.
LinkedIn
Vanessa Oakley
GM Strategy & Business Operations at Chorus
Vanessa is a long-time telco person, most recently driving the introduction of New Ways of Working across Chorus. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Prime Minister's Business Scholarship for which she recently spent 5 weeks at MIT working on management, innovation and technology. Vanessa is values and people led. She’s a firm believer that everyone has super powers and she's also a strong Agile advocate - the world is moving too fast to be anything other than Agile.
She might talk about the importance of environments for human beings to grow and adapt in an organisation and how Agile contributes.
LinkedIn
Sam Laing
Agile Coach at Nomad8
Sam wants people to be happy and productive at work. Working with purpose and meaning and joy. 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.
Hiria Te Rangi
Kaiwhakahaere at Whare Hauora
Hīria (Ngāti Porou, Tūwharetoa) loves her community and loves technology, so Kaiwhakahaere for Whare Hauora was a natural role for her.
With almost 20 years in tech with numerous technical and business roles in open data, open source, digital technologies and infrastructure. Hiria loves the way building out these incredible systems, is actually about the people, the tech is the easy part and she freely admits, being māori actually made things a lot easier.
JAFAC 2019 Topic
How Whare Hauora product development is driving the decolonisation of data collection and management. Why, "why" matters. In a World where everyone is connected, we assume that our personal data is being collected, managed and on-sold. It has become naturalised, that this is the fee we must pay in order to use the service. But what if it wasn't?
Bron Thomson
Founder and CEO of Springload
Springload is a highly successful digital design agency in Wellington which Bron has built up to a 75+ strong team. Over the last 15 years she has worked with many high profile clients including a number of large banks in both NZ and Australia, the NZ Red Cross, multiple local and central Government agencies, international arts festivals, and many highly successful medium to large size corporations across NZ.
Her strength is in human-centred future thinking, and digital strategy. She is a disruptor and an innovator, and brings both humanity and a huge wealth of digital thinking and behavioural science to her clients' businesses as well as her own.
LinkedIn
Sonya Williams
Co-Founder of Sharesies
Sonya saw an opportunity to make investing more accessible and provide everyone the chance to grow their wealth. She is a Co-Founder, Director and day-to-day runs the product and marketing at Sharesies. She comes from a career in startup, Saas and banking communities where she’s lead global marketing and product management—specialising in product strategy, customer acquisition, engagement and retention.
JAFAC 2019 Topic:
Sharesies is on a path to creating the most financially empowered generation! Just over 2.5 years ago they launched an online platform that made it easy to invest, and now have over 60,000 Kiwis investing. She'll share their experience from starting up to now, and lessons they've learned along the way.
Charlotte Walshe
CEO Jade Software
Charlotte currently heads up one of NZ's tech success stories; Jade Software - a company built on innovation that is based in Christchurch but works all over the world. She has a wealth of experience in the technology sector and has a particular focus on global new product commercialisation, and operations.
She will potentially speak about yodelling techniques of South America ... unless she tells us otherwise.
LinkedIn
Tony O'Halloran
Agile Coach
Tony uses his background in development to bridge the gap between IT and the rest of the business. He’s an Agile coach and facilitator who’s not afraid to address dysfunction, but always brings positivity and a sense of fun to his work. He is a terrible ukulele player and fearless mountain biker.