Thomas van Zuijlen

Hi, my name is Thomas van Zuijlen. As an energetic MC and a professional Scrum Master, I facilitate workshops and I host conferences, events and hackathons.

You can hire me to...

design and fuel your hackathons
level up your agile teams
improve engagement in your meetings
host your (online) events
design and facilitate your workshops

Drop me a line via thomas@vanzuijlen.com.
And/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

I'm available! Ask me to...

design and run your hackathon
level up your agile teams
create a bespoke workshop
host your conf or meetup

Book a 20-minute consult

Hosting & MC'ing

I enjoy MC'ing and building hype to create inclusive, enjoyable experiences - online and on-site.

Here's the (Dutch-language) aftermovie of The Big Water Hack 2024, a 60-people social hackathon on the future of water management that I presented and co-designed:

Here's a sample of me bringing my enthusiasm to Agile Day Kaunas, a 120-people Open Space-fueled conference in Lithuania:

Talks

Topics I speak about are Hybrid Work and Office-as-a-Tool, Collaboration and workplace inclusivity, teamwork in the digital space, workshop facilitation, and the Product Owner/Scrum Master dynamic in day-to-day Scrum practice.

Workshops

🥪 The Scrum PB&J is a highly interactive clinic in which Product Owners and Scrum Masters refresh their Scrum knowledge and increase their collaborative gains.
👖 Pants-to-Profit Agile Planning is a workshop format for teams to turn long-term objectives into experiment-driven backlogs.
🙋‍♂️ Distributed Workinar is an engaging online workshop about having engaging online workshops and meetings - it'll help you and your company get more out of working apart together.

Medium

Blog articles

Write-ups

Don't make "office" a synonym to "social connection"
How FindHotel quickly prepares and validates user stories
Full-day Scrum workshop for DIJ Digital with a little video
Takeaways from 🥪 The Scrum PB&J at Agile Lietuva Kaunas
Roundtable facilitation for The Assembly at TNW Conference
🥪 The Scrum PB&J at Product Owner meetup OWNED
Troika Consulting Consulting at Agile Camp Berlin
Custom Agile development all-hands workshop for Hyarchis

People in a video call joining hands for the camera

Sharing a connection on Zoom 👩‍💻🙏👩‍💻🙏👩‍💻

Facilitating change

I am an experienced facilitator for workshops, meetings and sessions - both online and in person. I combine goal-based learning design and an understanding of group dynamics to create a flexible space for participants to safely engage with one another. I have an active, confident stance.

I've facilitated roundtables, fishbowls, offsites, trainings, retrospectives, strategy sessions and webinars. Group sizes for my facilitation work have been as widely diverse as ranging from 3 to 75 people.

Agile Camp NL

Together with Karlijn Moll, I organised ⛺️ Agile Camp NL, a two-day BarCamp event for the agile community at a spectacular location in Utrecht. The first edition took place on Friday 1 + Saturday 2 Nov 2019.

About me

I have a decade-long background in agile co-creation and a knack for working with diverse, distributed feature teams. With a positive outlook on everything and a strong interest in agile coaching, I engage teams to work together effectively.

I'm a political scientist turned front-end developer turned Scrum Master, with extensive experience in conference and meetup organisation.

I operate in the Netherlands and in Lithuania, and I've been working with distributed teams non-stop since 2017.