Speaker

Karla Merza is an Agile leadership coach whose work focuses on authentic, self-aware leadership. She brings a practical lens shaped by experience across technical and business roles, including corporate environments and entrepreneurship, and partners with global organizations to strengthen Agile practices, improve collaboration, and help teams deliver meaningful, sustainable results rather than short-term output. Her work includes coaching leaders, implementing Agile frameworks, and teaching Agile Project Management and Advanced Leadership courses that connect theory with everyday leadership. She speaks regularly at industry events, including Women in Agile Europe, where her 2025 session, "Empowering Agile Professionals to Recognize and Break Free from Toxic Workplaces," addressed similar territory of psychological safety and workplace culture. These speaking and teaching roles anchor her experience in Agile coaching and leadership development.

 

Beyond Delivery: Redefining Project Success in a Human-Centered World A project can hit every metric and still cost too much: Karla Merza reveals that hidden cost in her session, "Beyond Delivery: Redefining Project Success in a Human-Centered World". This candid, deeply personal session explores what gets lost when success is measured only in scope, budget, and timelines, examining that cost at every level (individual, team, and organizational), offering fresh perspectives and actionable insights to build environments where people and projects both succeed. Drawing on a personal experience with a workplace that looked successful on paper while trust quietly eroded underneath, Karla walks through the warning signs that are easy to miss when the focus stays on delivery, and shows participants how to tell genuine cultural friction apart from patterns that are actually unhealthy. Through live AhaSlides polls, reflection exercises, and show-of-hands questions, with anonymous responses shared in real time, participants use personal retrospectives to examine their own leadership and well-being. The session treats psychological safety not as a soft topic but as a practical ingredient of sustainable performance.

 

Learning goals summary:

• Understand that it's not just about hitting scope, budget, and timeline targets – it's about the environment and people a project leaves behind.
• Empower project leaders to see psychological safety and well-being not as soft topics but as an opportunity to build sustainable performance and lasting trust.
• Recognize early signs of unhealthy workplace dynamics, and distinguish cultural friction from genuinely toxic behavior.
• Use personal retrospectives and values-based decision-making to reflect on your own leadership and well-being.