Core skills set:


- Agile coaching and mentoring at 1-2-1, team and wider organisational levels.
- People development and growth.
- Facilitation.
- Stakeholder engagement.
John Leighton scrum.org PALI John Leighton scrum.org PSMI John Leighton scrum.org PSMII John Leighton scrum.org PSPOI

I have successfully helped form new teams including setting up and supporting the recruitment process, this included co-creating job descriptions with recruitment partners. Conducting interviews with people and then onboarding them into the teams.


Helping teams to build relationships and setup ways of working together including facilitating team norms and shared team vision sessions, discussing how to deal with conflict within teams and enabling frequent inspection and adapting.


Agile coaching and mentoring on 1-2-1, team and wider organisational levels to help maximise the benefits of agility by moving towards an agile mindset.


Encouraging teams to work towards a devops model by ensuring there is enough focus on technical best practises like test automation, build pipelines (CI/CD) and a sense of ownership in the product(s) being created, because when teams get this right they can deliver value to the customer frequently.


Working closely with the Product Owner to ensure the team can focus on delivering the most valuable features to customers. Actively engaging with stakeholders, sponsors and users to provide feedback constantly as part of the development process.


John Leighton CV photo

Passionate about software delivery and technology, I have over 20 years experience working in delivery teams as a QA, Scrum Master and Delivery lead including over 10 years working in Agile teams.


Employment History:

2023 to Present

Sky logo

Delivery Manager

Sky

Part of Product Management - Entertainment area of Sky. Supporting 3 delivery teams that provide the Sky Go client applications for iOS, Android and Big screens (web & smart TV) by helping to ensure we have the correct number of people with the right capabilities to delivery against our product roadmap.

Actively contributing in our Agile community of practice, regularly facilitating and participating in 'Agile Cribs' sessions which allows people to ask, share knowledge, experiences and get help in a brave open space.


2021 to 2023

Sky logo

Delivery Manager

Sky

Part of the Global OTT Streaming and Platform capabilities area of Sky. Supporting 2 delivery teams helping to ensure we have the correct number of people with the right capabilities to delivery against our product roadmap.

Leading an iniative of evolutionary change by facilitating working group sessions that continuously identifies the current problems and challenges being faced and then helps create experiments to bring about change.

Worked closely with our Head of Department to define our vision, strategy, values and principles to enable the teams to self-manage within those guardrails.


2020 to 2021

Maersk logo

Scrum Master

Maersk

Working as part of the maersk.com platform creating greater visibility of customer data to enable them to effectively manage their full end to end supply chain.

Part of 2 scrum teams responsible for multiple products. Coaching and mentoring individuals, teams and the wider organisation around agile mindset and helping reduce waste in our workflows.

Actively contributing to our agile/scrum community of practice by co-creating and running regular meetups, training and mentoring sessions.


2019 to 2020

Maersk logo

Product Delivery Lead

Maersk

Working across multiple product delivery teams, both front-end and back-end, to identify bottlenecks and areas that can be improved in order for us to deliver customer value more frequently. Ensuring the teams have the correct capabilities and capacity to deliver the strategy and vision provided by the Product Owners in our product area.

Co-created a new operating model to clearly show how work comes into our area, how the teams were structured and organised, highlighted key people so stakeholders could easily get in touch via the correct channels. This was then made visible and communicated across the wider organisation.

Coaching and mentoring scrum masters within our product area, running regular ‘agile labs’ sessions as an open forum for team members to share knowledge, ask questions and seek help in a safe to fail environment.

Coaching stakeholders and sponsors around agile values and principles and encouraging greater day to day involvement with the development teams to ensure faster feedback loops.


2015 to 2019

Sky logo

Scrum Master

Sky

Part of 3, at different times, cross functional scrum teams including PO, BA/TA, QAs, developers and SREs, creating and supporting multiple back-end applications that are used by the Sky Q, SkyGo and NowTV client applications across iOS, Android, Web, XBOX, PlayStation and TV (Roku, AppleTV etc) platforms.

Mentoring and coaching development team members around scrum theory and values. 1-2-1 coaching when needed to help team members grow and reach the next stage of their agile journey.

Responsible for maintaining our product road-map and attending regular prioritisation meetings with our delivery manager to ensure the team are working on the most valuable pieces of work.

Organising 24/7 production support rotas with the team and providing an escalation point when needed.

Financial planning and forecasting across 7 scrum teams including tracking budgets and ensuring team members are charging to the correct time codes.