SauceCon Speaker Profile: Melissa Boggs

Melissa Boggs recently picked up one of her favorite childhood hobbies—roller skating—after a long hiatus. However, she doesn’t skate by when it comes to her favorite topic: business agility. 

In fact, Melissa recently joined the Sauce Labs team as VP of Business Agility, after being in the agile space for more than 12 years. She has a background in QA and has been a ScrumMaster, an Agile Coach, and was the co-CEO and Chief ScrumMaster of the Scrum Alliance before she joined the Sauce team to harness the power of change for the benefit of our customers. 

Melissa’s agile sensibilities inform her strategies for developing products and developing people. “The first agile value is to focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools,” she says. “And that does not mean that we don't think that process and tools are valuable, but people come first.” 

Melissa’s background in both quality assurance and agility enables her to connect with customers, because she has experienced some of the pain points that those in the testing community experience. She looks forward to digging into her new role and presenting at the upcoming SauceCon Online 2021 user conference coming up April 20-22. 

Melissa will be delivering a keynote presentation at SauceCon entitled “The Truth About Agile.” She will be talking about what it means to be truly agile in today’s changing world. “People have all sorts of opinions about what it means to be agile,” she says. “Maybe you’ve been part of an agile transformation, or you’ve participated in a Scrum or Kanban course. But those don’t define ‘agile.’ In fact, agile may not be what you think it is. It might actually be better!”

She doesn’t leave the concept of agility at the office, either: she and her family have also adopted agile practices at home. “Agile values and principles are tightly woven into our family,” she says. “It’s a very people-centric framework, and kids are people too!  One thing we use is the concept of retrospectives: looking back and reflecting on what worked and what didn’t in our family. I find this valuable both in the workplace and at home.”

When she’s not working, roller skating, or spending time with her family and pets, Melissa is a sought-after speaker at events such as the World Business and Executive Coach Summit, and has been featured in Business Coaching and Authority magazines. 

If you’d like to learn more about Melissa and other SauceCon speakers, check out the agenda and make plans to join us from your home office April 20-22.