Sara Lindqvist Senior Scrum Master
Amsterdam, NL • sara.lindqvist@gmail.com • +31 20 555 0148
Profile Summary
- Senior Scrum Master with 8 years of experience operating in scaled-Agile fintech organizations across retail banking, payments, and B2B SaaS, specializing in servant leadership, impediment removal, and empirical process control.
- Solid background across Agile tooling (Jira, Confluence), frameworks (Scrum, Kanban), scaling (SAFe, Spotify model), facilitation (Miro, Liberating Structures), and empirical metrics (cycle time, DORA) with strong fundamentals in empirical process control, servant leadership, and team-level continuous improvement.
- Deep expertise in servant leadership, impediment removal, empirical process control, and cross-team coordination, drawing on practices such as Liberating Structures facilitation and flow-based delivery measurement to build healthy, high-trust, and predictably delivering teams.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, UX, Data, and Risk teams in Spotify-model tribe and squad environments, contributing to PI planning, refinement, and retrospective design with a team-first, transparency-first mindset.
- Coach who shares facilitation craft and fosters a culture of psychological safety and working-agreement discipline through retrospective design clinics and impediment office hours, while leading Scrum Master chapter and facilitation guild and authoring widely adopted team-charter and Definition-of-Done templates; holds CSM and SAFe SSM.
Technical Skills
- Agile Tooling & Boards:
- Jira (boards, JQL, automation), Azure DevOps, Trello, Linear, Confluence, Miro, Mural
- Scrum & Agile Frameworks:
- Scrum, Kanban, Kanban, XP, BDD, TDD coaching, Lean Agile
- Scaling Agile Models:
- SAFe, LeSS, Spotify model, Scrum@Scale, Spotify model, Agile Release Trains, PI planning
- Facilitation & Events:
- Miro, Liberating Structures, Liberating Structures, planning poker, retrospective formats, working agreements
- Empirical Metrics & Flow:
- cycle time, velocity, burndown / burnup, cycle time, lead time, cumulative flow, DORA
- Coaching & Team Health:
- 1:1 coaching, team-health checks, Spotify squad-health model, conflict mediation, working-agreement design, Definition of Done coaching
- Certifications & Methods:
- CSM (Certified ScrumMaster), SAFe SSM, ICAgile ICP-ACC (in progress), Kanban Management Professional
- Stakeholder & Communication:
- Executive readouts, sprint demos, stakeholder coaching, written retrospective summaries, RAID-style escalation
Education
University of
Amsterdam
M.Sc. in
Business Administration (Strategy track)
Work Experience
ING
Senior Scrum
Master
- Serve as Scrum Master for the Retail Banking Mobile tribe across 3 squads (26 engineers), leading Scrum event facilitation, impediment removal, and team coaching on a product serving 6M retail-banking customers.
- Facilitate Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives on a 2-week sprints cadence using Liberating Structures formats, time-boxed agendas, and shared working agreements, running 60+ ceremonies per quarter and lifting Sprint Review stakeholder attendance from 9 to 24.
- Run a visible impediment board in Jira with weekly escalation reviews to engineering managers and the tribe lead, tracking 140+ blockers (technical, organizational, vendor) and cutting average resolution time from 11 days to 3 days.
- Coach 3 Product Owners on INVEST slicing, story splitting, and acceptance criteria, running example mapping and definition-of-ready clinics across 36 refinement sessions per quarter to keep the backlog ready two sprints ahead.
- Coach squads on collaboration, self-management, and technical excellence through quarterly team-health checks, working-agreement reviews, and 1:1 coaching on conflict and feedback, lifting the squad-health score from 58 to 82 over 4 quarters.
- Run empirical process control through cumulative flow diagrams, burndown / burnup readouts, and monthly DORA snapshots shared with the tribe lead, cutting per-story cycle time from 9 days to 4 days without weaponizing velocity targets.
- Coordinate across the SAFe Release Train through weekly Scrum-of-Scrums, dependency mapping with sibling Scrum Masters, and joint PI planning across 3 squads and 2 ARTs, holding the program commitment hit rate at 93%.
Adyen
Scrum
Master
- Embedded as Scrum Master inside a payments-platform squad of 9 engineers, 1 designer, and 1 QA, coaching the team on the Scrum Guide values, events, and artifacts and folding in BDD and TDD complementary practices through pairing weeks and engineering brown-bags.
- Educated engineering managers, the payments product lead, and risk stakeholders on Agile principles through monthly Agile-101 workshops reaching 80+ stakeholders and one-pagers on scope-time-quality trade-offs, supporting org-wide Agile maturity over 18 months.
- Surfaced and mediated team conflict early using the Spotify squad-health check, structured 1:1 conversations, and non-violent communication framing, lifting the squad engagement score from 61% to 84% over 12 months.
- Founded and ran the in-house Scrum Master community of practice across Engineering, Product, QA, and Risk, focused on retrospective design and cross-squad facilitation, authoring 11 facilitation playbooks and mentoring 4 newer Scrum Masters through their first PI cycles.