Women Igniting Tech

Mispah Carelsen is the Agile Coaching Chapter Lead at Countdown. Her journey started as a marketing manager at a tech startup, where she discovered & fell in love with the world of Agile, which is all about people & the way in which they work together to deliver value. Since that fateful time, she has played many agile roles, eventually landing on agile coaching & leading other agilists. She is passionate about making people awesome & bringing humanness back into the world of work. She is an active member of the Business Agility community & is also currently pursuing her PhD in Leading the Gen Z & Millennial generations.

Kari is an experienced senior leader, committed to improving the performance of New Zealand organisations through the increased adoption and application of emerging technology, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. Over the past 11 years, Kari has worked with a range of iconic organisations to increase their digital and analytics maturity, executing strategies that improve customer-centricity, and operational effectiveness and achieve significant business results.

Shannon is a commercially astute Senior Product Manager with more than 10 years’ experience leading and contributing to business transformation projects that enhance product functionality and deliver customer value. With strong interpersonal skills, she is adept at working collaboratively with cross-functional teams to develop product and digital channels in agile environments. Shannon is practised at defining business requirements, developing strategy, managing budgets and leading teams having done so at Countdown, Spark and Vodafone.

Shannon is a commercially astute Senior Product Manager with more than 10 years’ experience leading and contributing to business transformation projects that enhance product functionality and deliver customer value. With strong interpersonal skills, she is adept at working collaboratively with cross-functional teams to develop product and digital channels in agile environments. Shannon is practised at defining business requirements, developing strategy, managing budgets and leading teams having done so at Countdown, Spark and Vodafone.

An engineer by qualification, Manasi has been in the tech industry for around 17 years now. Have worked in various areas including software development, technical testing, test and test practice management, and project and delivery management across multiple domains in the United States, India and NZ.Manasi has worked in startups , mid-sized companies, as well as corporate environments across product based companies as well as consultancies and it, has been an enriching experience for me.Manasi says being a mum, balancing work/ life can get tough at times, so time management she has learnt, is a must-have skill to lead a fulfilling life!

Tingting is a senior software developer in countdown. Formerly a kindergarten teacher in China, she was inspired by my family in IT to transition into the industry. She has found programming to be a really fun subject and started to pursue a career to become a programmer by studying at Massey University where she majored in Software Engineering with Honours. During her last year of Uni, she started to participate in a part-time commercial project. After graduation Tingting worked with several companies to build several projects, which were used in NZ and globally.

Jing is a member of our Engineering practice. She is a full-stack developer at CountdownX. Jing is an accomplished coder and programmer and enjoys using her tech skills to solve real problems. Jing graduated from China in 2014 with Bachelor's degree in Network engineering. She moved to NZ and studied at Auckland University achieving a Masters's degree in software engineering in 2017.

Dr Mahsa Mohaghegh is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Women in Tech in AUT’s School of Computer, Engineering, and Mathematical Sciences. She is a well-recognised leader in AI and machine learning and is also the founder of the charitable trust She Sharp. She founded She# in the hope to bring about the much-needed change in the gender split in tech and believes that we must work together to solve this!

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