Masa has 25 years of experience in the software industry. His first contact with lean took place when he was a graduate student in Japan; and with agile before the Agile Manifesto itself was created. Masa applied that knowledge, and gained experience, at many of the companies he worked for until he decided to start his own Lean-Agile, Kanban, and Value Innovation practice--founding Shojiki Solutions--in 2008.

In addition to being our CEO, Masa is also an associate with David J Anderson & Associates (David J Anderson is the creator of the Kanban Method for technology businesses); and a Senior Consultant with the Cutter Consortium, where he specializes in Kanban, Lean-Agile Mangagement, and Value Innovation.

In the USA worked at Apple Computer's R&D campus in Cupertino California on the Mac operating system. He then joined Electric Communities, also in Cupertino, a pioneer startup on virtual environments and secure transactions online, which also contributed to the development of the Java programming language. Masa then joined When.com, as part of the founding team, a startup in Redwood Shores California that developed the first fully functional collaborative online calendar and event directory, where he co-built the QA organization. America-Online purchased When.com together with Netscape. Masa joined Ingenuity Systems (also as part of the founding team), a genomics company whose products are used by the top pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the world, as well as by hundreds of research centers and universities, to do scientific discovery to, amongst other things, be able to develop better drugs cheaper and faster.

Masa then changed context and took care of the QA organization and helped with project management for Akimbo Systems, a pioneer of online high-quality video entertainment. Within the same industry, he was a founding-team member of Vuze Inc., a peer-to-peer based company for high-definition video entertainment online, where he created the QA organization and took care of project management until a PMO was formally started.

Before the USA, Masa lived in Japan where he worked as consultant for Justsystems Corporation, the largest Japanese software company, where he contributed to the development of some of the core algorithms for their text-processing and graphics generation products; and also developed intelligent systems prototypes. Prior to Japan, he worked in Mexico as software developer for Serfin Bank and for Operadora Vips (now part of Wal-Mart).

Masa also found time to teach graduate students at the University of Tokushima in Japan, undergraduate students at the National University of Mexico, and professionals at the Arturo Rosenblueth Foundation in Mexico.

Masa holds a Ph.D. in Software Engineering and an M.S. in Information Science and Intelligent Systems Engineering from the University of Tokushima in Japan (Both in the field of Artificial Intelligence); and a B.E.,with honors, in Computer Engineering from the National University of Mexico.

Masa is also a:

• Accredited Kanban coach
• Certified scrum master
• Certified product owner
• Member of the coordinating committee for the Agile Project Leadership Network, San Francisco Bay Area chapter
• Founder of the Bay Area Limited WIP Society
• Founder of the Agile Project Leadership Network, Mexico chapter
• Member of the Mexican Academy of Informatics
• Editor for the lean-agile section, Software Guru Magazine
• Contributing editor for the lean-agile section, PMI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter

Masa's passion beyond lean-agile is the outdoors. He spends his free time climbing mountains, rafting class V+ rivers, mountain biking, backpacking, and whatever else comes his way (including and expedition to the Arctic and extreme solo expeditions to climb mountains, explore rain forests, etc.). One of his dreams is to do a solo foot-traverse of Antarctica. He is also an avid photographer.

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Masa K Maeda, PhD

Founder and princpal consultant