Katrina Thacker
My certifications
About
I consider myself a product delivery agility coach, enthusiast and ambassador. Over the course of my career I have been fortunate enough to engage in the ideation, design and delivery of information technology products and services for longer than I care to divulge. Much like the famous ‘Route 66’, I have undergone many improvements and realignments during my ongoing professional journey as a learner, doer and leader.
Back in the 90’s, I got my first taste of collaborative, co-creation product development in the form of RAD/JAD and never looked back. I am hooked on the thrill of working in teams and environments that thrive on learning and achieving and are literal petri dishes of trust and respect. I confess to being a reformed ‘Command/Control’ project and program manager and I still occasionally fall off the wagon, much to my chagrin.
These past 20+ years I've loved every minute of time I have spent working as a member of agile teams and organizations - both as a contributor as well as a coach and trainer. I am a hands on practitioner - even as a coach. My personal experience is that the secret sauce to agility is the culture - the true culture of how things are really done- not the one that is in the marketing material.
I have a passion for agile practices because for me they exemplify agile values and principles. I relish wearing the hat of, being a part of, training and coaching Product Owners(hip), Scrum Masters, Iteration Managers, ScrumTeams, Agile Teams and Agile Leaders.
Some of the most valuable techniques (by no means an exhaustive list) I've found and use include User Story Mapping (thank you Jeff Patton), User Story Writing & Slicing using BDD/ATDD (thank you Mike Cohn and Dan North), Retrospectives (thank you Diana Larsen), Innovation Games (thank you Luke Hohman) and the beautiful technical excellence disciplines of XP (thank you Kent Beck).
Experience and services
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Career history
- 2020-06-08 - present - Blackhawk Network Holdings (Sr. Director, Agile Practice)
- 2012-11-05 - present - SolutionsIQ (formerly Big Visible) (Business Agility Enterprise & Team Coach & Trainer)
- 2005-03-14 - 2008-07-31 - ThoughtWorks (Client Principal & Agile Coach)
- 2008-10-13 - 2011-11-30 - Nike Inc (Agile Practice Delivery Lead)
- 2011-12-05 - 2012-10-31 - Incept5 (Agile Product Delivery Coach)
- 2018-01-08 - 2020-06-05 - Box Inc (Agility Ambassador)