
People at Conflux
Experts who facilitate and catalyze change
Leadership
Renee Hawkins is a technology leader and transformation practitioner with over 25 years of international technology consulting experience. She has passion for optimising business value through organisation design, building a strong culture, leadership development strategies, career development and competency modelling, as well as, all the data driven operations needed to align supply and demand in a hyper growth company.
Carolyn Berry is Director of Business Operations at Conflux, covering business operations for all companies in the Conflux group. Carolyn’s expertise in administration and knowledge of business operations helps Conflux to operate across more than 15 countries worldwide.
Matthew Skelton is the CEO/CTO of Conflux and co-author of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (IT Revolution Press, 2019). This book has become the go-to reference for organizations worldwide seeking business agility and adaptability with software-enriched services.
Matthew is one of the foremost leaders in modern organizational dynamics for fast flow, supporting organizations with transformation towards a sustainable fast flow of value and true business agility.
Business Operations
Oana Leonte is Event Marketing Coordinator at Conflux, supporting marketing and business operations for all companies in the Conflux group. Oana brings with her a diverse skill set, with a background in event management, business administration, marketing coordination, data integration, project support, and pharmacy management.
Carolyn Berry is Director of Business Operations at Conflux, covering business operations for all companies in the Conflux group. Carolyn’s expertise in administration and knowledge of business operations helps Conflux to operate across more than 15 countries worldwide.
Consultants and Facilitators
Thomas Krag is a Fast Flow advisor and experienced technology leader. Thomas helps organizations optimize their software delivery processes by focusing on the human elements as much as the technical ones.
Michelle McDaid, The Leading Place founder, brings her vast experience and progressive thinking to bear in supporting businesses in creating workplace environments which empower high performance and great outcomes.
Christoph Steinlehner is a Product Coach & Consultant with over 20 years of experience in product and design roles. He guides Product Managers and Leaders in de-risking strategic decisions, shaping business models, aligning teams, and fostering collaborative innovation.
Rob Lazzurs is an early pioneer in fields such as configuration management and cloud computing. His driving force is trying to make technology easier for humans to use and automate boring tasks.
Francesco Bianchi is a Collaboration Alchemist on a mission to help individuals, teams & organisations grow their work environment into something that can nurture their human needs and those of their customers.
Rich Allen is an independent consultant and socio-technical architect focused on helping organizations optimize for fast flow.
With over two decades of hands-on technical experience as a software developer, Rich has held many roles from software engineer and tech lead through to architect and CTO of a bootstrapped startup.
Jack Ridge is a Delivery Management Consultant who specializes in supporting and facilitating teams to achieve fast flow and greater value.
His focus is enabling teams to move towards product-centric delivery, adopting socio-technical thinking by provoking thoughts to deliberately change their posture to best suit the strategic and technical environment using Team Topologies.
Kenny Baas-Schwegler is an independent software consultant and trainer, he specialises in technical leadership, software architecture, and sociotechnical system design.
Kenny works with organisations and teams to design and build sustainable and resilient software architecture.
Simonetta Batteiger is a Product Leadership Coach and experienced product and growth leader.
She has spent 15+ years in B2B Saas organizations building and scaling Technology products that have been used by hundreds of millions of users globally.
Tom Salvini is a Business I.T. Consultant specialising in simplifying complex software systems, uncovering hidden value in data, and rescuing IT projects at critical crossroads.
With over 25 years of experience across diverse industries, Tom combines deep technical expertise with a facilitative approach to solve the most challenging business and development problems.
Gielen Rojas-Lopezis a persistent optimizer of services and a long-time advocate of systems thinking, I focus on seamlessly integrating value chains, customer experience, and operational efficiency to drive value. I firmly believe that, much like ecosystems, organizational improvement must embrace interconnectedness and continuous adaptation.
Fortune Buchholtz is a seasoned Enterprise Agilist and Business Agility Coach with over 15 years of experience guiding organizations through complex transformations. Specializing in adaptive methodologies, Fortune excels at coaching distributed teams to enhance delivery efficiency, organizational flow, and customer value in an environment of psychological safety.
Cliff has made a career out of breaking down the obstacles that stand in the way of great work. He is often challenging the status quo in his quest to develop the right culture and systems for creation of excellent Companies and Products.
Tom is a product management consultant dedicated to enhancing consumer experience through insight and efficiency.
He began his career at a successful dot com startup, where he embraced small team dynamism and covered several roles. He subsequently carried this hyper-agile business experience (a rapid application development culture and relentless customer centricity) into more corporate settings.
Before joining Team Topologies and Conflux to lead the Go-to-Market as Head of Customer Success, Val Yonchev spent time at Red Hat and Digital.AI, where he led teams focused on helping organizations to become more successful with technology. In his work, Val is very much driven by his belief that organizations must continuously evolve to remain places where people can bring their full creativity and full self to work.
Alumni
Sorrel is a learning specialist with 15+ years experience supporting learning across the education and technology sectors. She currently operates as a solo consultant, offering ‘Learning as a Service’ - a range of services aimed at enabling the continuous, systemic learning of individuals, teams and whole organisations.
At Conflux she helps to shape and enrich the learning experiences of our clients, advising on all aspects of learning design, from content creation to the way learning is delivered within our engagements. Sorrel is a firm believer that successful transformation hinges on a culture of continuous learning characterised by effective learning behaviours, including reflective practice, collaboration, experimentation and feedback.
Victoria is an independent consultant with nearly 30 years' experience in the technology industry, 15 of which have been spent operating within organisational leadership. There, she has coached teams and senior leaders to effectively deliver outcomes within a culture of inclusion, collaboration, curiosity and generosity.
Himanshu Swaroop is a transformation practitioner. He has more than 15 years of experience leading transformation within enterprise businesses. The impact of his work is based on behaviour and systems change across teams. For example platform teams visualising their work to continuously improve flow of work.
Thiago is an independent consultant renowned for his data and AI/ML expertise. His empathetic, equitable approach is a hallmark of his leadership, having guided AWS teams and collaborated with startups and prominent names like ASML, KLM, and Nike. Thiago is at the vanguard of integrating fast flow and Team Topologies into data and AI/ML initiatives, emphasizing kindness and empathy in tech management.
His consultancy style blends wit, empathy, and a fair-minded approach, valuing each team's unique context and capabilities. Thiago's recent venture, the Lovelace Series, spotlights the challenges and triumphs of women in tech, addressing critical issues such as micro-aggressions and retention. A regular speaker at European conferences, he shares insights on the confluence of Data Engineering, Data Science, AI/ML, DevOps, and Fast Flow, contributing to a more inclusive and forward-thinking tech landscape.
Becky Thorn Sietsma is an experienced consultant helping teams to align and evolve their organizations so together they can create impact at scale in an ever changing world.
Her consulting focus is business-tech alignment, and she champions the important three-way collaboration between: strategy - team design - tech architecture.
Sarah Wells is an experienced technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on microservices, engineering enablement and technology strategy. She has over 20 years experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and devops teams.