Rafael Sabbagh

Rafael Sabbagh has over two decades of experience with a variety of enterprise IT projects, programming languages, and software development methods and techniques. Rafael is the co-founder of Knowledge21, an international training and consulting company and leader in Brazil’s market. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and a member of the Scrum Alliance Board of Directors. He has a master’s in business and a Computer Engineering degree.

Rafael has done training and consulting in over 20 countries in the last few years, including Peru, Colombia, India, Hong Kong, Canada, USA, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, UK and many others. He is Brazilian and an European Union citizen, and he speaks Portuguese, English and Spanish fluently. By traveling and interacting with different communities and cultures he has got a global view on how software is being developed globally, what the main challenges are and ideas on how one can get around them. Rafael is known for being a good negotiator, creative and balanced in the decision making processes. He values listening and having conversations. He values transparency, experimenting, inspecting and adapting.

Besides IT conferences, Rafael has also been to over a dozen Scrum Gatherings in different countries (as a speaker at most of them) and interacted with those various communities. Rafael was also co-chair of the very successful Regional Scrum Gathering Rio de Janeiro in 2014 and 2015, and will be co-chair of the upcoming event in 2016.

Rafael is passionate about Agile product development. He uses with his coaching clients an innovative and pragmatic problem-solving approach for developing software products, focused on fast return on the investment that has proven to bring impressive results.

Working in software development projects and with Agile training and coaching for the past several years brought Rafael the knowledge and experience to write and publish, in 2013, the first book about Scrum written in Portuguese. It is today a well known reference in his country.