Cliff is Managing Partner of Agile 2 Academy. As a successful tech entrepreneur, he was co-founder and CTO of Digital Focus, a startup that grew from 2 to 200 people in five years and was known for its success in rapidly building high reliability Internet-facing mission-critical systems for companies like FedEx, McKesson, United Overseas Bank, and many others. It was acquired in 2006. Cliff’s 2006 textbook High-Assurance Design documents many of the engineering and agility lessons learned. Since then Cliff has helped with more than ten Agile or DevOps transformations, and is a DevOps trainer and subject matter expert. In 2020 Cliff assembled the global Agile 2 team to reimagine “Agile”, and was the lead author of the Agile 2 book. Cliff is certified in the Human Synergistics Organizational Culture Inventory® and Organizational Effectiveness Inventory® assessment tools. He has degrees from Cornell University in Operations Research, Nuclear Engineering, and Physics.

Interviews:

Subkit

by Javier Garzas

Startup Valley

TechTarget

Keynote in Madrid in 2022, subsequent Panel discussion

Stephen Villaescusa is a Partner of Agile 2 Academy. He is an experienced consultant, trainer, coach, and business development executive. For nearly 40 years he has led Continuous Improvement, Supplier Improvement Lean, Six Sigma, and other transformation initiatives with hundreds of companies around the world. He also has significant experience in technical recruiting and retention. He worked as a Recruiter and College Relations Manager at IBM, and was a member of the HR Corporate Executive Team at Raytheon. He has a BS in Business Administration from the University of Arizona completing majors in Marketing, Psychology, and Communications. He completed executive certificate programs at Columbia University (Personnel) and the UCLA Graduate School of Business (Procurement).

Author, speaker and facilitator of strategic innovation leadership, with a passion for inspiring, enabling and empowering innovative people, teams and enterprises to achieve amazing results, in terms of customer experience and growth of value. “Dr Dave” cofounded the MIT Innovation Lab, which led to important insights shared in his best-selling book, The Seven Sins of Innovation: A Strategic Model for Entrepreneurship – which “elevates the thinking on this crucial subject to the highest level” according to Roger Lacey, Chief Strategy Officer, 3M.

Before becoming a consultant, Dave has a long history of global executive P&L responsibility at the £B level. Some of his consulting clients have included Digital Barriers, New Era Technology, Pinnaca, Microsoft Ventures, ebm-papst, Analog Devices, Solid State Supplies, the UK Cabinet Office, the Hippodrome Casino, Qualcomm, NHS England, Vistage International, King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

For the past decade, he has served various enterprises as a board director or advisor, Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society, and Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, and the Institute of Directors. Dave has a PhD in Mathematical Psychology and Neuroscience from the University of Toronto.

Dr. Nagappan is a Partner of Agile 2 Academy. He is also the founder and CEO of Catum - a software startup for product management tools. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning and Computer Science and has over 20 years experience in software engineering, from startups to banks to software vendors. Raj was on the Agile 2 team, and is a co-author of the Agile 2 book.