Henrik Kniberg

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Who is this guy?

I like making software and helping companies improve! Most recently worked as Minecraft gameplay designer & developer & coach at Mojang. Before that, spent a bunch of years coaching Spotify, Lego, and other fun companies. Was CTO at a few companies before I got into coaching. Wrote a few books on agile/lean stuff. Accidentally co-created something people call the Spotify Model. Made a bunch of videos, such as Agile Ownership in a Nutshell. Done some work with climate change: co-founded GoClimate.org and made a video about climate change (important! watch it!). Co-founded Hups.com together with my buddy Niklas Modig.

I live near Stockholm with my wife & four kids. Like to Jam 🙂

Books

• Scrum and XP from the Trenches
• Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both
• Lean from the Trenches – managing large scale projects with kanban

Popular videos

• Spotify Engineering Culture (the origin of the so-called Spotify Model)
• Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell (short visual summary of agile)
• Friendly Guide to Climate Change (short summary of climate change and what you can do about it)
• The Resource Utilization Trap (a live demo of the pull principle in lean)
• Testing Minecraft with Minecraft
• Multitasking vs one piece flow (a live demo)

Popular keynotes

Here are some of my most popular keynotes. The other 30+ keynotes are available here.

• How to make awesome products – Mind the Product, London
• Confessions of a Change Agent – Agile Turkey, Istanbul
• Agile, where are we at? – USI, Paris (see also my blog post)
• Focus (Stop Starting and Start Finishing) – Agile By Example, Warsaw

Popular articles

• Making sense of MVP (and why I prefer earliest testable/usable/lovable) – the origin of the skateboard vs car metaphor. 
• Scrum Checklist – unofficial, but so popular that it is kind of the official unofficial checklist
• How we got rid of time reports – a story of waste elimination
• Cause-effect diagrams – a pragmatic way of doing root-cause analysis
• Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds – this article, followed by the culture video, is the origin of the so-called Spotify Model
• Agile version control with multiple teams – old article (pre git), but still relevant and popular

Selected interviews/podcasts

• This week in video games – we talked about Minecraft development, leadership, visual thinking, remote work, and other topics. 
• The spawn chunks ”The hills are alive with Henrik Kniberg” – we talked about the new terrain generation in Minecraft among other things.
• Visual thinking podcast (also on Spotify & Apple) 

Some more links and fun facts

• I was featured in the film Squads, about 45 minute documentary about how the Spotify model became a thing, and why it has become so popular. 
• When I was on the Agile Alliance board of directors I initiated and organized a worldwide community effort to get the Agile Manifesto translated to 67 languages 🙂
• I’m a Certified Scrum Trainer. In addition to my own coureses, I’ve also co-taught Scrum certification courses together with Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum) on a regular basis for over 10 years. I’ve also worked with a lot with Mary Poppendieck, Alistair Cockburn, Niklas Modig, and other Agile/Lean thought leaders. I’ve learned so much from them!
• I’m also a Certified Scaled Agile Framework Program Consultant (SPC) and a Certified LeSS practitioner. I also helped develop Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum@Scale framework. But I mostly don’t use scaling frameworks, and instead just take the best bits of them when needed.
• I was rated #2 best developer in Sweden by Computer Sweden in 2015. And rated #3 in 2012. Been on the top-20 list every time since 2008. Although admittedly that rating system was more a popularity contest.