Todd Holden

My name is Todd Holden.

I arrived to software development through a very unique path. I started my professional career as family services worker so I spent about the first decade of my professional cultivating skills of listening, coaching, negotiation and servant leadership. I think these experiences and skills assisted me when I transitioned to a career in software product development. I have always had a strong affinity to build things and be part of a team firmly believing in the idea that you 'lead from where you stand".

After extensive experience es in software development in the areas of software testing, business and process analysis and technical leadership, I observed a disturbing pattern of failure in projects, especially large multi-year endeavors. They all started out with exciting groups ready to change the world with the product to be built but often ended in demoralized teams, general dissatisfation by stakeholders and typically lots of finger pointing to "the problem" by every group. I would then see a repeat this cycle again to fix the problems that happened before. I knew that there had to be a better way to work and I personally needed to find how we could work more collaboratively and be committed and creative again.

I was fortunate enough to have bosses that allowed me the flexibility to experiement and was able to try a more feature driven team focused approach while working in the cancer research software industry. I saw a great deal more success with this small team focused on feature horizons where collaboration and communication was high. At the time, I think I attributed the success to a group of highly motivated software professionals just getting it done. What I didn't know is that I was knocking on the doors of working in an agile way. 

Being an avid thinker, I followed a lot of thought leaders for various software concepts. It was one of these forward thinkers that was one of the initial delegates of the agile manifesto. This document and the scrum framework built upon these principles really resonated for me and after reading them I was a convert. I knew it was the way that the industry as the whole needed to work and the direction of being value focused made so much sense to me and I started immediately to apply the principles within my work. I have worked very hard over the years to understand fully and implement scrum starting as a scrum master to progressing to more of an agile coach at an organizational level and guiding those in other areas, specifically in the government domain eventually as a leader of product development. I am a true believer that you can apply concepts of agility in any situation and that many practices of scrum can be applied outside of the area of software development.

I always look for opportunities to exchange ideas, grow myself or assist others to transform so please feel free to reach out to me!