John Heintz is the founder and principal technologist of Gist Labs. He is an experienced agile manager, particularly in lean and kanban. In 2008, John founded Gist Labs to further focus on the essential criteria for innovative success. On a recent project, he coached a 100-person agile/lean game studio, helping the organization increase its throughput of game features per month while coordinating cross-team communication paths, resulting in a doubling of features in one year.

John began his career as a technologist and coach, always seeking solutions with greater leverage and deeper simplicity. His approach to systems and team building emerged in 1999 while leading his first Scrum team, coaching XP and test-driven development. John has consulted with clients on various engagements, including for enterprise architecture, development practices, XP and Scrum leadership, lean value stream mapping, and RESTful/messaging architecture, and has developed an inhouse training course in AspectJ. He has built single-source hyperdocument SGML publishing systems, a version-control CORBA/Python CMS, an AspectJ dependency acquisition framework, and added test automation to many Java and .NET systems. He is a regular speaker at industry events, including No Fluff Just Stuff(NFJS), Architecture and Design World, and Dallas JavaMUG, and is the Program Chair for Agile Austin. John is a Technical Consultant with Cutter Consortium’s Agile Project & Product Management practice. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan.

John is an Innovation Games Trained Facilitator