About Karen and Sam

We are Sam Laing and Karen Greaves. We have worked in software our whole lives. With Type A personalities and a strong work ethic, we have both done our share of overtime on death march projects. Eventually we knew we had to find another way. This is when we discovered agile software development. A new way of working that finally made sense and seemed to restore some of the sanity and humanity to the business of software development.

Agile is also what brought us together. Karen interviewed Sam for a position in a company where she was introducing Scrum (an agile framework). As soon as we met, we knew we had to work together. The rest as they say is history. Although we worked at different companies after that, we stayed in touch, and attended conferences together.

In 2012, we took the plunge and started our own business, Growing Agile. Since then, we have been doing the work that we are passionate about: introducing people to agile and helping those experienced with agile to continuously improve. What we love most is having a positive impact on other people’s lives.

Many of the tips you will find in this book come from our experience with agile and helping teams improve. We’ve applied most of these tips to our own business and realised that agile techniques are often just common sense. They work as well for small business owners as they do for agile teams in large corporates.

We hope this book brings peace, clarity and flow into your life.

If you’d like to contact us, you can email on karen.greaves@gmail.com and samantha.laing@gmail.com.