Joel Bancroft-Connors

Joel works with product leaders, practitioners, and delivery teams inside some of the most complex organizational environments: financial services, government, healthcare, defense, and large-scale enterprise technology. Known as The Gorilla Coach, he focuses on the problems that don’t go away after the certification. Systems-level problems like competing priorities, misaligned stakeholders, slow decisions, and the friction that keeps good teams from doing their best work.

Over 25 years, Joel has partnered with organizations including BMW, Salesforce, VMware, MassMutual, Costco, Hitachi, and multiple state and federal agencies. That breadth matters in the classroom. Students from regulated industries, government environments, and large enterprises work in systems where textbook Scrum rarely survives contact with organizational reality. Joel teaches from that context, not around it.

In Joel’s classes, you won’t find slides or lectures. Sessions are built around collaboration, Miro-based activities, small group work, real organizational scenarios, and structured breaks designed to keep learning sharp throughout the class. Students consistently say the format surprised them, and that they left with tools they used as soon as the next day. His Sprint in the Life series extends that learning beyond class, giving students a practical guide to applying what they’ve learned inside their real organizations.

Joel also integrates generative AI into his teaching and facilitation work, applying it to backlog refinement, OKR alignment, and facilitation design in ways that reduce friction rather than add process. He teaches and helped develop the Scrum Alliance AI credential, bringing a practical, grounded perspective to how AI changes the way teams actually work.

A Certified Scrum Trainer® and Certified Team Coach with the Scrum Alliance, Joel also holds the Project Management Professional (PMP) and PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP). This combination means he understands the organizational world most students are actually working in, not just the Agile world they’re trying to move toward.

Most organizations don’t have a Scrum problem. They have a visibility problem, a prioritization problem, or a decision-making problem. Scrum is just the tool that makes those problems impossible to ignore.