AgileSparks Team

Danko is a seasoned veteran in the IT industry. His first steps began in 1997 when he completed 5 years of service in the Israeli army in a special elite program, where he was Group Manager in a computer unit. Afterwards, Danko joined a startup by the name of EagleEye, a subsidiary company of New Dimension where he was in charge of several development groups.

In 2000, BMC purchased New Dimension and Eagle Eye became a business unit of BMC. In 2005, Danko was exposed to Scrum and from that date there was no looking back. Danko gained more and more knowledge and experience in Agile and specifically in Scrum and found himself lecturing and helping other companies to implement Scrum.

After leaving BMC, he served as VP R&D in several companies and when the demand for Scrum was too much to handle in parallel, he resigned all posts and became an independent consultant. After an intensive year in which Danko lectured and implemented Scrum in dozens of companies, he initiated AgileSparks.

Danko is a well recognized international speaker with unique ways of presenting Scrum to newcomers. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer (one of only 137 international trainers in the world). Danko is best known for his great enthusiasm for Scrum and his Scrum spark.

Dr. Zernik holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University, where he specialized in distributed systems. Dr. Zernik has conceived, originated and implemented several research directions to final products, as a researcher (IBM, Tandem) and as an entrepreneur.  He has over 20 years experience in leading system projects in distributed and Internet-based environments.

Dr. Zernik was co-founder of several start-up companies in leading technical positions managing the development teams. These companies have completed the product development, and are in various stages of market deployment, including some exits.

Throughout these years Dror has learned that the agile concepts work for him best - daily synchronization with periodic re-alignment, TDD and continuous integration were at the foundation of all the successful projects he was involved in. Since 2008, Dror has been coaching startups in both technological and management directions, often leading the Scrum-Kanban-Agile processes.

Ofer is a Lead Coach working and mentoring teams, managers and large scale Agile implementations. Ofer has 25 years of experience in software development and more than 10 years as a Senior Manager/VP R&D. 

Ofer has a deep understanding of R&D and QA processes and is directly involved in activities of defining customer requirements, system architecture, project management of large scale systems and enterprise products. Before joining AgileSparks, Ofer worked as Head of R&D at SunGard and as R&D Director at BMC Software managing over 60 developers in multiple sites. In 2005 Ofer was the first to implement Scrum at BMC software Israel in a large scale project (8 teams working in 3 different locations). The challenge was huge and Ofer together with his team lead the change and the agile thinking in his Business Unit. From a stall condition in the project it was turned into delivering working software in short iterations and achieving project milestones.

Prior to that, Ofer had worked for many years in multiple positions as Manager, Team leader and developer of UI and servers side applications. 

With over 17 years in technology management both in IT and Product Development, Yuval easily jumps into the world of our clients - whether a small startup, enterprise product development, or an IT unit.  Yuval has led some of our key enterprise level agile implementations, and has been central to AgileSparks's pragmatic best-of-breed solution design, taking the best from each approach, and not sticking to any particular dogma. Over the last couple of years, Yuval has led the inclusion of thinking/models from Kanban, Complexity Thinking, Lean Startup, and more into the AgileSparks method and has created our Kanban/Flow Lean practice and basically kickstarted Kanban for software in Israel.  Yuval was one of the first Accredited Kanban Trainers worldwide, a seasoned Scrum practitioner and CSM/CSP/CSPO with lots of experience helping organizations use Scrum in a way that works and delivers in the real world. He's been nominated twice to the Lean Systems Society Brickell Key Award for upcoming world-influencing talent and is a Lean Systems Society Founding Fellow. You can check out his thinking in the popular blog at YuvalYeret.com or in his book "Holy Land Kanban".

Sagi started his career in software 20 years ago, fresh out of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Since then he has worked as a Software Engineer, Software Architect, Project Manager, Product Manager and VP R&D in companies ranging from the defense industry and the financial services sector to start-up environments. While at Investment Technology Group in 2001, Sagi led the first project to adopt eXtreme Programming and later on lead the company’s global transition to Agile using a mix of eXtreme Programming and Scrum. Sagi has been teaching courses in Software Engineering at Ben Gurion University, and Python intro courses at the Hi-Tech college. Sagi holds a B.A. in Physics and B.Sc. in Materials Engineering. Nowadays, Sagi focuses on agile teams transitions, process metrics and simulation of software processes and on creating tools that help distributed teams and companies collaborate effectively. On the rare occasions when he’s not busy dealing with technology and teams, Sagi flies small airplanes.