Tasha

Tasha Akimchenko
Agile Coach | Team & Organizational Effectiveness | Systems Thinking | Continuous Improvement
Kyiv, Ukraine · Remote (CET/EET) · [відкрити контакти](див. вище в блоці «контактна інформація») · [відкрити контакти](див. вище в блоці «контактна інформація») · [відкрити контакти](див. вище в блоці «контактна інформація») · English C1

PROFILE
Agile Coach and Team & Organizational Effectiveness practitioner with 8+ years in software delivery, including 4+ years working at
team, cross-team and ART level in a SAFe environment. I diagnose why delivery systems behave the way they do by combining
stakeholder interviews, observation and flow/delivery data, then turn those insights into practical change. My work spans team
autonomy, delivery effectiveness, team design, cross-functional alignment and systemic impediments above individual-team level. I
build capability rather than dependence on the coach and work through influence, evidence and experimentation rather than process
compliance. I’m looking to broaden this scope further into organizational effectiveness and change, in a people-centered product
environment built on trust, ownership and open, direct communication.

EXPERIENCE
Scrum Master — Team & Organizational Effectiveness | Finsight Group Inc. (FINSIGHT), Kyiv / Remote | Jul 2022 – Aug 2026
Capital markets data & analytics platform (US). SAFe environment; up to 4 Scrum teams (~20–24 engineers), 2 teams in the final 6 months.
• Built autonomous, self-managing teams through a staged ownership transfer: reviewed and clarified team processes, taught the
underlying principles, facilitated the practices together with the teams, and gradually handed over ownership of Daily Scrum, Planning and
Refinement.
• Used flow and delivery metrics to identify team bottlenecks and impediments and improve team effectiveness. Introduced team-owned
measures including commitment reliability, capacity utilization, throughput, carry-over, and cycle time by workflow stage; carry-over fell
from roughly 50% to 10–15% on average and velocity stabilized, improving forecast reliability.
• Applied root-cause analysis to distinguish symptoms from underlying constraints, combining flow data, team observations and stakeholder
input to identify the actual source of delivery and effectiveness issues.
• Worked systemically across four teams at ART level: mapped dependencies, surfaced recurring patterns and coordinated with Product,
System Architecture, QA leadership/Release QC, Shared Services and the RTE. Initiated ART-wide retrospectives and cross-ART Scrum
Master syncs so systemic issues reached the functions that owned them.
• Facilitated resolution of systemic issues across teams and functions: when a recurring dysfunction was identified, brought the relevant
stakeholders together, made the problem explicit, and facilitated communication and agreements on ownership and next steps.
• Initiated and co-designed the restructuring of an engineering group of ~20 people into four focused cross-functional teams, including
composition, hiring/onboarding input, and designing and facilitating all four kick-offs. Communication, trust and delivery stability improved;
emergent team dynamics were monitored and adjusted afterwards.
• Applied an organizational-design lens (Org Topologies) to map how work and people actually moved through the organization, identify
role-fit mismatches and reason about structural changes against organizational goals.
• Applied pragmatic change management to support adoption rather than compliance: used clear purpose, explicit boundaries and bounded
experiments when teams resisted changes, then inspected outcomes and adapted. Changes that proved useful held without ongoing
enforcement.
• Used an AI agent in coaching practice: analyzed YouTrack and GitHub flow data with Kiro — PR size, review latency, rework and
open-to-merge time — to locate review/integration bottlenecks. Findings were kept private and used for development conversations, not
ranking; the observed improvement was directional rather than formally baselined.
• Designed and implemented a quarterly performance and development review process that created structured input for development goals,
mentoring, appraisal and salary-review decisions, while giving employees clearer visibility into expectations, progress and areas for
growth.
• Designed and facilitated team workshops on facilitation, constructive feedback and collaboration; selected retrospective techniques by
intended outcome, coached individuals through development conversations and supported peer capability building.
Project Manager | ITRex Group, Kyiv | May 2018 – Jul 2022
Custom software development: R&D/IoT, e-commerce and mobile projects; teams of 5–13 including client-side members.
• Managed a 13-person bioengineering/IoT R&D project (8 internal, 5 client-side) on Scrum with end-to-end delivery ownership including
budget, resourcing, risk and client expectations.
• Delivered a cross-platform iOS/Android marketplace on Kanban, choosing the delivery method to fit the context rather than applying one
framework everywhere.
• Ran planning, estimation, refinement, demos, retrospectives and 1:1s; set up Jira workflows and Confluence spaces from scratch;
interviewed and onboarded team members.
English Instructor & Translator | Opentenders.Online; TOV TOKMASTER, Kyiv | Nov 2016 – Jan 2018
Designed and delivered an in-house English programme for ~40 staff alongside interface, legal and technical translation and
software project documentation in Jira/Confluence. Preceded by five years of private English teaching, 2009–2015.

CORE SKILLS
• Coaching & change: Agile coaching; team autonomy and self-management; capability building; change design and adoption; resistance
handling; influence without formal authority
• Diagnosis & data: Systems thinking; root-cause analysis; stakeholder interviews; qualitative research; flow and delivery metrics;
hypothesis-driven intervention

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• Organization & delivery: Team design and restructuring; organizational-design analysis (Org Topologies); cross-team and ART-level
coordination; systemic impediment resolution; continuous improvement
• Facilitation & development: Workshop design for teams; stakeholder alignment; ART-wide retrospectives; constructive feedback;
developmental conversations; peer capability building
• Frameworks & tools: Scrum, Kanban, SAFe; YouTrack, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Excel; AI-assisted delivery and pull-request flow analysis
(Kiro)

CERTIFICATIONS
Org Topologies Practitioner (OTP) — Org Topologies, 2026 · Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) — Scrum Alliance, 2025 · Systems
Thinking for Leaders — Scrum Ukraine, 2025 · Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF) — ICAgile, 2024 · Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I)
— Scrum.org, 2023

EDUCATION, LANGUAGES & SPEAKING
• National University of Dnipro — Specialist, Sociology, 2002–2007. Qualitative research and social-systems training supports my
systems-oriented approach to teams and organizations.
• Languages: Ukrainian — native; Russian — native; English — C1 (five years teaching English; two years professional legal/technical
translation).
• Panellist, UA Project Management Day 2026 — managing group dynamics in agent–human teams: how AI agents affect team dynamics,
conflict and the role of Agile practices.

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