agile
(27)
iCert Global sells the time to learn
The credential is the destination. This Houston-based training company sells three different ways to get there, with very different demands on your calendar and wallet.
Jerry Zhang and the curious advantage of getting older
Shinetech’s founder made a recruitment pitch to programmers over 35. Behind it sits a longer argument about experience, freedom and what a software engineer is actually paid to do.
Tridibesh Satpathy and the problem of getting everyone on the same page
From a business funded with personal savings to the Scrum Body of Knowledge, Dr. Tridibesh Satpathy has built a career around a stubborn question: how do people learn to work together?
Mahesh Singh Has Spent a Career Making Work Visible
The NimbleWork co-founder has moved from engineering to operations, product, consulting and marketing while keeping one durable idea in view: teams make better decisions when they can see the work.
NimbleWork Spent 24 Years Turning the Messy Middle of Project Management Into a Product
The company formerly known as Digite is betting that the next project-management winner will not force every team into one doctrine. Its pitch is more practical: make the work visible, connect strategy to delivery, and let AI handle the blank-page chores.
Atlassian
Two Sydney graduates put $10,000 on credit cards in 2002 and built the software that runs the world's software teams. Today Atlassian's Jira, Confluence, and AI teammate Rovo power more than 300,000 companies - without ever relying on a traditional sales force.
Cyril Daloz
Cyril Daloz is the founder and CEO of iObeya, a French enterprise software company that digitizes the Japanese lean concept of the Obeya, a visual war room, so distributed teams can run their planning, brainstorming and problem-solving rituals on shared virtual boards. After two decades in enterprise IT and a first company, KAP IT, Daloz spotted the idea in 2011 while helping PSA Peugeot Citroen digitize its physical visual-management rooms. He has since grown iObeya into a platform used by large manufacturers, banks and aerospace and defense organizations, raising $17 million in Series A funding and opening offices across Europe, Asia and the United States.
Shortcut
Shortcut is a New York-based software company that builds a fast, lightweight project management and issue-tracking platform for software teams. Founded in 2014 as Clubhouse, it sits between the simplicity of Linear and the depth of Jira, offering sprints, boards, roadmaps, milestones, and automations. In 2025 it launched Korey, an AI agent that turns ideas into build-ready plans and orchestrates work across humans and AI agents. The platform has powered 21 million-plus completed stories across 50,000-plus organizations.
Josh Knowles
Josh Knowles is the CEO of Code Climate, the New York software company whose Velocity platform gives engineering leaders at large organizations data on how their teams actually build software. A Ruby developer by training with more than two decades in the field, he spent years at Pivotal Labs and VMware building and running consulting and application-services teams across the US and Europe before joining Code Climate, rising from VP of Strategy and Operations to General Manager to CEO. He took the top job as Code Climate spun out its code-quality product into a separate company, Qlty Software, and refocused entirely on software engineering intelligence for large, complex enterprises.
Kurt Schrader
Kurt Schrader is the co-founder and CEO of Shortcut, the New York project management platform for software teams that started life as Clubhouse in 2014. After years of building and scaling engineering organizations, including a stint as CTO of Intent Media where he grew the team from one person to more than 40, he set out to build tooling that stays simple for daily users while giving leaders real visibility. In 2025 he steered Shortcut into the AI era with Korey, an AI product manager that turns plain-language ideas into build-ready plans.
CivicActions
CivicActions is a fully remote digital services firm that helps U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies modernize the technology behind public services. Founded in 2004 by Henry Poole and Aaron Pava, the company pairs free and open-source software - especially Drupal - with agile delivery, DevSecOps, human-centered design, and accessibility expertise to rebuild legacy government websites and platforms. Guided by the values of Balance, Openness, and Care, CivicActions has served agencies including Veterans Affairs, the FCC, the National Science Foundation, and the State of Georgia while contributing heavily back to the open-source communities its work depends on.
ONES.com
ONES.com is an all-in-one project and knowledge management platform built for software teams. It bundles project tracking, a Confluence-style wiki, test management, and CI/CD pipeline integration into one workspace, with AI woven into every plan and a strong emphasis on on-premises and air-gapped deployment. Founded in 2015 and backed by investors including GIC and Source Code Capital, ONES positions itself as a unified, self-hostable replacement for Atlassian's Jira and Confluence for enterprise teams that need data sovereignty.
Oddball
Oddball is a McLean, Virginia-based digital services agency that modernizes how the U.S. government talks to its citizens. It builds and maintains some of the federal government's busiest websites - notably VA.gov for the Department of Veterans Affairs and Medicare.gov for CMS - using human-centered design, agile engineering, and modern cloud infrastructure. Founded in 2016 and led by CEO Travis Sorensen and CTO Rob Wilkinson, the remote-first firm calls itself 'a strangely human digital agency,' and grew to roughly 340-366 employees and ~$117M in annual prime contract revenue before taking a 2025 growth investment from private equity firm Falfurrias Management Partners.
Justine Davis
Justine Davis is the VP of Developer Marketing, Community, and Developer Relations at ServiceNow, where she oversees a developer community of more than one million members and shapes the narrative of ServiceNow as a global developer platform. With roots in digital marketing and a career arc that ran through Hotwire, Atlassian (over nine years), and Postman, she has built a reputation for translating complex technical products into language that resonates with developers and enterprise buyers alike. Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, she is known for her candid takes on developer marketing, her emphasis on showing rather than telling, and her belief that DevRel and Developer Marketing are two sides of the same coin.
Mural
Mural is the AI-powered visual workspace where distributed teams run workshops, map ideas, and make decisions together. Born in Buenos Aires in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company powers visual collaboration for most of the Fortune 100, including IBM, Atlassian, Intuit, and Autodesk.
Afshan Azhar
Afshan Azhar is the Chief Executive Officer of Mural, a leading visual collaboration platform headquartered in San Francisco, California, with over 900 employees and $193 million in total funding. Based in Islamabad, Pakistan, Azhar leads a company that has become a cornerstone of enterprise collaboration - enabling remote and hybrid teams to brainstorm, map customer journeys, run design sprints, and facilitate workshops through an AI-powered digital canvas. Mural serves thousands of enterprises globally, integrating deeply with Microsoft 365, Slack, and other productivity ecosystems.
Cesar Donofrio
Cesar Donofrio is the co-founder and CEO of Making Sense LLC, a Palo Alto-based technology consulting and software development company he built from a startup in Mar del Plata, Argentina into a 350-person nearshore powerhouse serving mid-market U.S. enterprises. Over 20+ years, he has co-founded five companies - including Doppler (email marketing), Lander (acquired by a Silicon Valley firm), and Viallion (AI-driven investment platform) - while championing a talent model where 90% of the workforce is Latin American. Named Top Midmarket IT Executive of the Year in 2017 and a Nearshore Americas Power 50 Leader, Donofrio blends engineering precision with UX philosophy and AI strategy to deliver measurable business transformation.
Henry Poole
Henry Poole is the co-founder and CEO of CivicActions, a professional services firm that has spent over two decades modernizing government digital services through open source software, agile methodologies, and human-centered design. A serial entrepreneur and open source visionary, Poole co-founded one of the first digital agencies (Vivid Studios) in 1993, published the landmark Affero General Public License (AGPLv1) in 2002 to close the 'ASP loophole' in open source licensing, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation. Under his leadership, CivicActions has become a trusted partner to major federal agencies including CMS, NSF, VA, and HHS, championing the principle that software built with public funds should be publicly owned.
Rohan Marfatia
Rohan Marfatia is the CEO of DataCRaiM, Inc. (formerly Beround), a technology consulting firm specializing in Data, AI, and CRM solutions for equipment leasing, finance, and MedTech/healthcare sectors. With over 20 years of experience across India, the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States, he has built a career at the intersection of enterprise technology and human-centered leadership. A TEDx and keynote speaker, President of IAMCP Northern California, and a 2024 Fremont mayoral candidate, Marfatia is also running for Alameda County Supervisor in 2026. He holds an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis and an engineering degree from Sardar Patel University.
Rosalba Reynoso
Rosalba Reynoso is the co-founder and CEO of Blue Trail Software, a San Francisco-based benefit corporation delivering custom software, AI/ML, IoT, and QA solutions for enterprises and scale-ups across the Americas and Europe. Coming from a human resources background rather than a technical one, she built a nearshore Pan-American IT company with teams across Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Spain, serving Fortune 100 clients including Samsung, Cartier, Hewlett Packard, and Logitech. A proud Latina leading a women-founded and women-led firm, Reynoso champions diversity and inclusion, stakeholder empowerment, and social impact - from funding coding bootcamps for women in Mexico to creating the My Luna menopause-tracking app.
Valerio Adrián Anacleto
Valerio Adrián Anacleto is the co-founder and CEO of Epidata, Latin America's first innovation outsourcing company, which he built from a three-person startup in Buenos Aires in 2003 into a 900-person firm operating across 10 Latin American countries and the United States with $30M in annual revenue. A product of Argentina's public university system who started working at age 10 in the La Matanza district, Anacleto also serves as First Vice President of CESSI, Argentina's software industry chamber, and is a longtime professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Universidad Católica Argentina.
Vaughn Paladin
Vaughn Paladin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Arcsona, a Salesforce consulting and IT services firm headquartered in Campbell, California. He co-founded Arcsona in 2010 alongside Stephan Thomsen, drawing on 15 years of consulting experience at Ernst & Young and as CEO of FocusFrame. Under his leadership, Arcsona has grown to 83 employees across three continents, completed over 200 Salesforce implementations, and shipped Spark - a no-code tool for Salesforce Experience Cloud - on the AppExchange.
Ali Mannan Tirmizi
Ali Mannan Tirmizi is a Pakistani IT leader and engineer who went from co-founding a Harvard-backed water filtration startup at 23 to becoming a Senior IT Manager at Procter & Gamble, where he leads supply chain cloud platforms across Asia, Middle East and Africa. With a background in Electrical Engineering from LUMS and comparative public policy from UMass Amherst (US State Department SUSI program), he bridges technical depth with social purpose - slashing $220K in cloud costs at P&G while previously building a $2 water filter that removes 99.99% of bacteria for Pakistan's underserved communities. He also writes on data management for DATAVERSITY and holds a YouTube channel where he shares insights from his journey.
Corey Haines
Corey Haines is a software developer, community catalyst, and author who quit a dead-end job in 2008 with $2,400 in his pocket, hit the road for 9 months pairing with programmers across the US for room and board, and accidentally invented the Coderetreat movement along the way. He co-created Coderetreat (now run in 100+ countries annually), wrote 'Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design' based on observing thousands of programming pairs, co-founded Hearken (an audience-engagement platform serving 60+ global newsrooms), and has spent two decades championing software fundamentals over hype — all while claiming his only real goal in life is to be happy.
David Pereira
David Pereira is a Brazilian-born product leader, author, and keynote speaker based in Munich, Germany. He is the creator of the 'Untrapping Product Teams' newsletter (23,000+ subscribers) and the author of the Pearson/Addison-Wesley book of the same name. With 10+ million readers reached since 2020 and 88,000+ LinkedIn followers, he is one of the most prominent voices in modern product management. His philosophy centers on cutting through 'bullshit management' to enable teams to create real value for customers and businesses.
Kent Beck
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.
Michael Feathers
Michael Feathers is a software consultant, author, and Chief Architect at Globant whose 2004 book 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' redefined how developers think about untested code - coining the now-universal definition that legacy code is simply code without tests. With over 25 years consulting hundreds of organizations, he pioneered dependency-breaking techniques that gave teams a way into codebases they feared. Today he explores how AI reshapes programming, writes the 'mechanisms' newsletter on Substack, and continues speaking at conferences worldwide.