Denis Salnikov

Professional Scrum Master | Agile / Kanban / OKRs Coach |
LeSS Coach | CMI Team Coach | Organizational Design Consultant

[email protected] | + 48 (571) 062 - 112

Current location - Krakow, PL

Denis Salnikov is a certified Scrum Master & LeSS Practitioner actively consulting, coaching, mentoring, and teaching cross-functional development teams, companies management, and organisations since 2014.

Denis's main goal is to help organisations and their development teams deliver successful high-quality product(s) or service(s) while preserving a passionate working atmosphere and eliminating the gap between tech and business. He has led and taken an active part in several Organisational Design changes initiated from scratch, working with both development teams and management, helping to establish and foster business agility, self-management capabilities and product management.

Skills

Organizational Design
Systems & Critical Thinking
Scrum / Kanban / XP (eXtreme Programming)
Scaling (LeSS / Scrum@Scale / Nexus / "Spotify model")
Individual & Team Coaching
Mentoring
Facilitation
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
Training & Education

Experience

PandaDoc Inc. (Remote / San Francisco, CA)

Head of Agile Practices
Sept 2021 - Jan 2024 (full-time)

Responsibilities & achievements:
At the Company level:

- Served as a direct manager for a team of Scrum Masters (four, as of now);
- Helped to develop and pilot the Team North Star tool for Teams' maturity assessment and guide their further development;

- Designed and facilitated multiple Track Leadership strategic offsite events;
- Co-designed and ran the regular educational classes (Scrum Basics, LeSS Basics, Facilitation Basics) class;
- Delivered on-demand workshops (Team Self-design Workshop; Elephant Carpaccio; User Story Mapping; Backlog Items Decomposition Techniques; Giving & Receiving Feedback).

At the Agile Org level:
- Initiated and led creation of Engineering Practices and Asynchronous Communication Guides;

- Supported maturity of Agile Vision and Practices at four Tracks (Track = LeSS Requirement Area);

- Introduced the Mentorship structure and led its pilot in the Agile Org serving as a Mentor on topics such as Product Ownership, Scaling, Organisational Coaching and LeSS for multiple Scrum Masters;

At the Tracks (Business Areas) level:
- Supported Org Design changes in three Tracks (Growth, Solutions and Ecosystem), helping to identify and achieve System Optimization Goals;
- Worked as a part of Track Leadership Group of four Tracks over 1.5 years, helping to tackle structural, operational and behavioural challenges;
- Served as a Scrum Master for eight different Teams over 1.5 years, supporting their maturation, process improvement and individuals' development (Engineers, Product Managers, QA Specialists, Designers);
- Supported the Continuous Improvement (Kaizen) of Track Events (Sprint Planning, Product Backlog Refinement, Overall Sprint Retrospective) and way of working (Engineering Excellence, Technical Practices, Flow Management, etc.);
- Introduced and navigated multiple Self-design workshops as a way to set up and kick-off new teams.

Scrum Master

Mar 2021 - Sept 2021 (part-time freelance)

Responsibilities & achievements:

- Supported the growth of the Ecosystem Track (Track = LeSS Requirement Area) from 1 to 5 Teams during the Launch and Product-market Fit stages of the PandaDoc for Developers product.

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Backbase R&D B.V. (Remote / Amsterdam, NL)

Senior Scrum Master
Jan 2021 - Aug 2021 (part-time freelance)

Responsibilities & achievements:
- Helped to improve collaboration at three Scrum Teams and one Kanban (DevOps) Team; - Provided Engineering Managers with a metrics-based reporting structure, that enabled Evidence-based Management and Teams' Health assessment;
- Designed and facilitated educational classes on Scrum, Kanban, Relative Estimation;
- Stabilised relationships in teams applying Team Coaching and Facilitation.

OTP Bank, Ltd. (Remote / Budapest, HU)

Lead Agile Coach
Aug 2020 - Feb 2021 (full-time freelance)

Responsibilities & achievements:

At the Agile Community level:

- Mentoring, coaching and teaching services for Agile Coaches;

- Led the development of the Agile Coach Qualification and Development framework;

- Introduced a set of internal developmental activities, such as Agile Community of Practice, Agile Intervisions and the Mentorship program.

At the Company level:

- Hired and on-boarded members of the internal Agile Coaching Community (13 people hired in six months);

- Reported directly to the CEO and Senior Management Team (Board members);

- Provided coaching services to the CEO;

- Assisted HR and T&D departments in defining new roles in the agile structure and ways to asses their performance;

- Helped to define and formalise the expectations company has from the Agile Coaching Team and ways to measure the progress of its achievement.

smava GmbH (Berlin, DE)

Senior Agile Expert
Feb 2020 - Jul 2020 (full-time freelance)

Responsibilities & achievements:

- Assisted four teams in gaining maturity and proceeding to the next level of self-organisation using Scrum framework and practices & tools from XP, Kanban and LeSS;

- Helped to ensure better collaboration between Development Teams and Product Owners;

- Facilitated Business Domain-level events and Incident post-mortems;

- Provided trainings, coaching and mentoring services to company employees.

Finleap Connect GmbH (ex-FinReach Solutions) (Berlin, DE)

Scrum Master & Agile Coach
Nov 2018 - Jan 2020 (full-time)

Responsibilities & achievements:

- Led the LeSS framework adoption effort for 4 non-co-located development teams (Berlin, Hamburg and Krakow) working on the innovative API-platform for financial services;
- Helped to re-establish and improve the development and maintenance process of FinReach's original product offering (SwitchKit) using the Kanban method
- Designed and facilitated Product/Tech and company-wide educational sessions and workshops (e.g. Company Values workshop, User Story writing workshop, User Story decomposition workshop, LeSS Kick-off, etc.);
- Helped the C-level of the company to introduce the OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) framework as a goal-setting tool for strategic objectives.

N26 GmbH (Berlin, DE)

Agile Coach
Apr 2018 - Nov 2018 (full-time freelance)

Responsibilities & achievements:

- Helped the Internal Tools team to tailor a Scrum-based process using Kanban and XP tools & practices. More details here;
- Ran the regular Agile On-boarding sessions for groups of new-joiners;
- Facilitated project post-mortems and Retrospectives for other teams and stakeholders including C-level.

Exness Ltd. (Limassol, CY)
Scrum Master
Oct 2016 - Apr 2018 (full-time)

Responsibilities & achievements:

- Successfully launched 2 pilot Scrum teams and helped to introduce Product Management practices to the Company;
- Took part in Scrum scaling using elements of LeSS (Large-scale Scrum) framework;

- Served as a full-time Scrum Master for 3 teams working on such high-end projects as:

- Implementing cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH) as a Payment Solution for Clients;
- Connecting and maintaining Payment Solution Providers from different regions of the globe;
- KYC & AML related initiatives;
- Transition from the Monolith Back-End architecture to Microservices.

Starcode Ltd.
Scrum Master & Agile Project Manager
Aug 2015 - Oct 2016 (full time)

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Southmedia
Project Manager
May 2014 - Aug 2015 (full time)

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Recommendations & Feedback

Gerben de Graaf

Engineering Director at Backbase R&D B.V.

Denis Salnikov demonstrates a highly analytical approach, which aids decision-making and analysis of the process. Denis introduced and supported various agile improvements across the teams of my department and actively participated in the recruitment effort.

The retrospectives and health checks Denis held positively affected the overall effectiveness of the teams, helped them to identify opportunities for improvements and pain points.

Vladimir Tatarinov

Chief Technical Officer at Exness Ltd.

We have worked closely with Denis Salnikov through a very intense period for our company. What started with two pilot Scrum teams has later turned into a full-scale company transformation resulting in the LeSS setup of seven teams.

Denis helped to introduce the change and helped us to make it sustainable. With his assistance, we turned original pilot teams into separate startup entities.

Claudio Cicali
Tech Lead at N26 GmbH

When Denis joined our team in N26, we were for sure lacking some guidance and our workflow needed a lot of refinements. Denis embraced the challenge and helped us perform at our best, making everybody in the team proud to be part of it. Together with him, in just a few weeks, we defined and shaped our Scrum implementation so to reach a pleasant, conflict-less and effective work pace.

It's a real pleasure working with Denis, who is a very effective, pragmatic and result oriented person but at the same time always friendly and nice. I have also rarely seen co-workers so keen to extend their knowledge and at sharing their findings while improving their skill-set the way Denis does.

Mona Lau

Senior Product Owner at smava GmbH

I had the pleasure working with Denis for six months. He joined our cross-functional team as an Agile coach. In a very short time frame, Denis managed to increase our velocity and effectiveness.

What I appreciated the most was that he didn't come in looking to change everything no matter what. He did his assessment through observations and gave suggestions. The change happened from within the team because we have realized that we had so much potential to unlock. So it felt really natural. I am very grateful to have had the chance of working with Denis. He inspired me and ignited my passion for Agile methods all over again.