Aaron worked with our organization as a product coach during an Agile transformation initiative . From my personal experience, Aaron brought a fresh perspective to how I thought about product, and catapulted our approach to user-driven development. The skills, and more importantly, the mindset of this approach was instrumental in how we shaped our client-based initiatives, resulting in a significant increase in revenue and improved sustainability across our development teams. Aaron's lessons have stuck with me through my career and have in turn made me a better coach and mentor to my client organizations.
Dianne Miller
Senior Expert | Training & Development Programs | Analysis & Design | Leadership Development | Assessment & Metrics
Aaron is better than anyone I know at artfully translating deep knowledge of agile theory into inspired practice. He is incredibly engaging, fun, smart, helpful, and relevant as an instructor and coach. I've hired him multiple times in different organizations. Each time his work resulted in rave reviews and product culture transformation.
Kevin McDunn
Chief Product and Technology Officer: Translate Tech Into Customer Delight, Scale People & Systems, Communicate Persuasively
We have leveraged the training Aaron provided to grow foundational knowledge across the enterprise. His view on product discovery is key to ensuring teams have the "DEEP" backlog required to deliver the right value at the right time in the right way. I would highly recommend Aaron and look forward to working with him in the future.
Neill McLeod
Senior Vice President, Enterprise Agile COE and Capabilities Leader at Truist
Aaron is very insightful when it comes to evangelizing techniques to helping communicate and organize the work being done. He has had an enduring positive impact on our organization building a safe/open culture and helping collectively grow product teams. Aaron has such great energy and is very passionate in anything he participates in. He would be a great fit for to any company looking to employ new ways of organizing and collaborating across teams.
Ashley Williams
Cloud/DevOps Engineer
Can you also tag people as having the skill "All Around Great Guy"? I worked pretty closely with Aaron while at Yahoo and he was a steady, patient influencer and educator as he brought both devs and management around to the benefits of a well-implemented agile program. I learned a lot from Aaron plus he was just a warm, genuine person that was a pleasure to work with. Miss you, Aaron... meet up for a drink some time?
Robert Ames
Engineering Manager - Salesforce
Aaron Sanders is an effective, passionate Agile evangelist and coach. During his consulting time spent in my org at Disney ABC Television Group, I extracted massive value from his coaching around supporting/encouraging high performance teams, product discovery, and Agile at scale in an enterprise environment. Any business, small or large, looking to mature their Agile approach or newly adopt Agile practices would do very well to bring Aaron in to facilitate.
Lazar Crawford
Program Manager at Disney ABC Television Group
Aaron was engaged as our Agile transition coach, helping us to launch our Agile teams in Q3 2012, through Q3 2013. Aaron is passionate, knowledgeable, and effective at what he does. Now that the engagement is over, we stay in touch to ensure the continued success of our Agile transition. Should the need arise, I would not hesitate in re-engaging Aaron.
Bob Martin
Agile Coach at The Weather Channel
I had the pleasure of working with Aaron as we attempted to arrange some Agile training for one of IBM's partner organizations. Through our conversations it became clear to me that Aaron is someone with profound respect for people and a deep understanding of the dynamics and complexity involved in organizational and cultural change. I would welcome the opportunity to work with him again and highly recommend him to others. He is the real deal ????
Rob Purdie
Agile Practice Lead, IBM Marketing Experience Labs
Aaron is a true wizard when it comes to Agile transformation. His ability to explain principles and and help organizations make true culture change is remarkable.
Chris Hill
SVP, CTO Ziff Davis Spiceworks, B2B and Media | Technology Strategy | Cloud Platforms
Aaron Sanders helped Weather Underground learn to improve its product development work flow. We went from having little process riddled with disorganization to a team-based agile environment. Aaron made the process fun and flexible. I feel like the result was an agile environment custom tailored to our work place community.
John Celenza
Director of Software Development at Weather Underground
Our organization hired Aaron to improve our Agile practices and make us more efficient, and he definitely delivered. Afterwards all of us had a clearer understandings of Agile principles and how to best apply them on the job. Aaron is very amiable in his work, which makes his teachings more effective. He'll learn your name immediately and never forget it. I can recommend Aaron to any company looking to improve their efficiency using Agile methods.
Gevik Sarkissian
Senior Software Engineer at Google
Aaron is a great teacher and coach. I worked with him on a major agile transition. I found his teaching style very compelling and I really like the work he has done to integrate product discovery with agile delivery. I hope to work with Aaron again and look forward to that time.
Bob Payne
VP Enterprise Agile Consulting with LitheSpeed
Aaron was hired to introduce Dual Track Agile to a large, mature Digital organization firmly rooted in waterfall delivery. While Aaron’s initial contribution was highly successful (three Agile pilot teams with more coming), his contribution has been much more significant than that. While Aaron helped the teams get up-and-running, his lasting contribution was that he initiated a cultural shift at our company—one that is still gaining momentum more than a year after our first session. The teams have learned the fulfillment that comes with the deliberate pursuit of high performance and continuous improvement. Others within the organization and across the company have taken notice—and now they want it too.
Austin Bishop
Enterprise Agile Transformation Leader | Digital Technology | eCommerce | Change Management | Process Improvement
We hired Aaron to provide Product Discovery and Agile training at Marriott in 2013. It was one of the best training we have had. The first training was for over 40 people and it was so productive that we brought him back several times for more training. The key differentiating factors were: - He was quick to understand our business model, the areas we needed to focus on and tailored the training accordingly. -He was very creative with his presentation and training style, making them very interactive and engaging sessions. -Excellent knowledge of the subject. I strongly recommend Aaron!
Dhruba Deka
Senior Director at Marriott International
Aaron changed the culture in our web and mobile divisions from waterfall to agile, resulting in 125% to budget delivery in 2013. His deep expertise and relentless coaching led our teams to exceed KPI achievement expectations, and gave confidence to our executives that their agile investment delivered very high, measurable ROI. I unquestionably recommend Aaron to organizations seeking increased innovation and speed to market with new products. You will come away the richer.
Jeff Hutkoff
Certified Scrum Product Owner
While I was coaching a client, they brought Aaron in to teach them methods of including product discovery in the same team as the Agile Software delivery. He did an excellent job of getting them enthused about the process. They are currently using the techniques he showed them to reduce the lead time from having an idea, through validating the idea with actual customers, to putting that idea into production. The big wins are with the ideas that are rejected. One team saved the company a lot of money by finding that an ideas that was proposed was not wanted, and was solving a problem that people didn't have.
George Dinwiddie
Owner, iDIA Computing, LLC and Computer Software Consultant and Coach
I've worked with Aaron both as a fellow Agile Coach and most recently we hired him to kick-off a new product discovery team. Aaron is exceptional. He is extremely knowledgeable about how to innovate, how to organize and how to build products that kick butt. I intend to hire him again and give him my highest recommendation!
Brent Harrison
VP, Marketing & Consumer Products at Quixey
We had Aaron in for an Agile/Kanban workshop that was a solid first step to opening up communication and getting the work to flow. The workshop was full of hiccups and we threw him a lot of curve balls. He was on point, flexible and most of all invested. Aaron is clearly an pro at what he does and I have received the same feedback from many coworkers who joined the workshop. Many thanks Aaron. We will definitely be hiring him again in the near future. We have a lot more work to do and we all agree he is "The Man".
Brian Marshall
Sr. Director IT, Product Support, QA at Delivery Agent
Aaron is the real deal and would recommend him with no reservation. He truly adapts to your organization needs and practices what he coaches.
Donald Army
IT & Operations Consultant at Self Employed
Aaron is a natural leader who quickly earns his colleagues' respect. He has a keen understanding of agile development and a great ability to apply his knowledge in practical ways to help teams succeed. He is a great software developer and an accomplished agile coach.
Brad Swanson
Vice President and Senior Agile Coach at agile42. Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST) and Coach (CSC)
Aaron was a dependable teammate. Always asking if he could help out in any way and was in the middle of everything in no time giving very insightful feedback. Never afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty, a true team-player. Diligent and tenacious, he approached problems in a non-conventional way which often led to the best solutions. It was a true joy working with Aaron because despite his skill and talent, he was humble and light-spirited, not to mention, down right hilarious. Kudos to you. We have come far.....
Ramon Jimenez
Global Implementation Manager - Cummins Business Services
Aaron's job title should really be Master of Scrum. Aaron introduced the Agile Scrum methodologies to our web application development team, it had to happen quickly and with buy-in from not just the dev team but also management, Aaron succeeded and ultimately enabled our product to grow and change with market pressures that were competitive and moving rapidly.
Carl Bolter
User Experience Designer, Vianet
It was a joy working with Aaron. He always had an innovative approach to problem-solving and energized the workplace.
Caitlin Scott
Social Performance Manager at Friendship Bridge
Aaron is a committed and knowledgeable Agile practitioner. He is fearless in experimenting new ideas and bringing them to life. He wrote quality code, extensive unit and integration tests while developing an enterprise grade software product using Test Driven methodology. His efforts were valuable in delivering the product in 2 week cycles.
Deepak Gaur
Consultant
Aaron is a courageous, focused, energetic software coach with deep insight into the motivations behind Lean and Agile processes. He would be an asset to any organization that sincerely wants to improve what they do and how they do it, and I personally hope to work with him again someday.
Orion Auld
Founder / VP Engineering at SwiftStack
Aaron introduced the idea of a formalised agile methodology, Scrum, for us at vianet.travel and quickly became a positive agent of change for us as an organisation. He provided the motivation and wherewithal to get the wheels of the development team turning smoothly and fast. He is also a fantastic developer and very quickly got up to speed with our product in the time he was here. I would have no hesitation in recommending Aaron to any organisation that wants to go places.
Vaughan Fergusson
CEO - Vend, pioneer of the retail operating system for bricks and mortar stores.
Aaron is a genuine great guy, with contacts world-wide. It's a great pleasure to have worked with Aaron.
Mario Levesque
Senior Oracle Financial Consultant, Red Rock Consulting
Aaron has a commitment and insight into product development practices and principles that make it impossible for his presence not to make any organization better. Whether he is refining unit tests or hunting down organizational bottlenecks, his value is unquestionable.
Yuri Gadow
Independent Developer: high-ROI software for web and mobile.