Who is Carlton?

Carlton Nettleton is the President of The Scrum Academy, a global provider of live and on-demand training that improves the performance of Agile teams. He brings twenty-five years of experience with Scrum and other Agile practices and is an expert at designing and delivering impactful Agile training for enterprises of every size.

Over the years, Carlton has advanced through multiple professional roles: programmer, ScrumMaster, product manager, Certified Scrum Trainer®, instructional designer for online and in-person courses and consultant for a wide variety of companies. This diverse work history gives him the ability to connect to people in all Agile roles, from many different backgrounds by providing interesting real-life examples and posing purposeful, insightful questions.

Above all, you will find that Carlton is empathetic to the challenges businesses face when adopting Scrum and other Agile practices. Unlike most instructors, Carlton has five years of experience as an executive leader. Which means he has seen the impact of Agile adoption from multiple points of view. This allows him to be thoughtful, understanding and pragmatic when advising teams and organizations on how to adopt Scrum and Agile.

As a recognized thought leader on Scrum and Agile practices and product management, he has spoken at over sixty events around the world. He has been writing about Scrum and Agile practices since 2008. This includes a short book on Scrum, Fourteen Observations of Good Scrum Practice, that helps new Scrum Teams overcome common obstacles to high performance. He speaks three languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese) and lives in Portugal with his family and a Boston Terrier named Bruno.

Carlton Nettleton

What are Carlton’s accomplishments?

  • 20+ years of experience with Agile and Scrum. Over the course of his career, Carlton has been a programmer, ScrumMaster, product manager, Certified Scrum Trainer® and consultant.
  • Designed the continuing education programs for Certified ScrumMasters® (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owners® (CSPO) for the Scrum Alliance®. If you have taken a CSM or CSPO course, you have seen Carlton’s work.
  • Developed the first online, on-demand certification program for advanced CSM and CSPO practitioners. Over 1,400 learners from over thirty-five countries have participated in this program.
  • Five years as the SVP of Product at Applied Frameworks, a management consulting firm. Carlton helped scale the company as it grew from five to twenty employees and launched multiple, successful products.
  • Author of Fourteen Observations of Good Scrum Practice, a short book on how to successfully implement Scrum within a team, which has also been translated into Spanish.
  • Trained 5,000+ professionals on the effective use of Scrum and Agile practices and over 500 enterprise product managers on how to build profitable products.
  • Carlton has visited over twenty-four countries in five continents, using his English, Spanish and Portuguese.