Cathy Simpson

Cathy Simpson is a Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST) and Project Management Professional (PMP) with over 20 years of experience helping teams and leaders work effectively in complex, real-world environments. She is known for combining rigorous Scrum practice with strong facilitation, creating learning experiences that are practical, engaging, and grounded in how work actually happens inside organizations.

Before becoming a CST, Cathy worked across the technology and business landscape as a software developer, web producer, project and program manager, consultant, scrum master, and Agile coach. This breadth allows her to teach Scrum in context—addressing stakeholder dynamics, organizational constraints, and the human side of change, instead of treating Scrum as a set of abstract rules.

Cathy’s training style is intentionally facilitative and experience based. Rather than relying on lecture, she designs learning environments where participants think, experiment, and figure things out for themselves. Students leave her classes with clarity, confidence, and a much better sense of what Scrum looks like in their own organizations and how they can make it better. Her work is informed by advanced training in Agile Leadership, Training from the Back of the Room, Open Space facilitation, Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), and Organization & Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC), which allows her to work skillfully with teams, leaders, and the systems they operate within.

Cathy has taught and coached across enterprise, startup, nonprofit, and public-sector organizations, and has delivered Scrum education internationally over many years. She also serves as an Impact Advisor for the U.S. State Department–sponsored TechWomen program, mentoring women leaders and technologists worldwide.

Whether working with new practitioners or seasoned leaders, Cathy creates learning environments where assumptions surface, good questions matter, and Scrum moves beyond theory to become genuinely useful in real work.