Holly Bielawa

Holly Bielawa is an entrepreneur, business strategist, Agile Coach, and Requirements Craftsman, with over 15 year of experience successfully developing new businesses, executing product strategy, transforming executive and technical teams, and releasing award-winning products. In 1998, Ms. Bielawa co-founded software start-up ICEAS, winning an INC. Technology award for best B2B web application in 2000, and achieving profitability the first year on revenue of 500K. After selling the company in 2001, she served at the executive level at several technical start-up companies including NovoDynamics, Inc., where she collaboratively transformed the first Agile team in the company, a strategy which resulted in additional investment, rapid product development, and the 2005 international launch in Dubai, UAE of VERUS, the only U.S. manufactured desktop Arabic OCR. 

Since founding Agile Growth Strategies in 2008, Ms. Bielawa has applied her teaching, business, and product strategy background to help clients successfully transform internal product development for collaboration, efficiency, and rapid adoption. Using Agile, and Lean Start-up tools and processes, she has worked for clients such as Menlo Innovations, The Accent Reduction Institute, Ford Motor Company, Gale Group (part of Cengage Learning, Milady (part of Cengage Learning), Accuri Cytometers (now part of Beckman Coulter), University of Michigan, Pillar Technologies. She was also awarded US Patent No. D493536 for her work designing a new blood glucose meter, currently commercialized by assignee Hygieia, LLC. 

Ms. Bielawa continues to collaborate in transformative/innovative consulting engagements with clients developing technical products, and enjoys teaching and using collaborative and problem-solving approaches for the management of effective and successful product development strategy from business stakeholders to technical team execution.

Specialties:Agile and Lean Start-up Transformation – Chartering, Business Models, Transformation, Lean, Story-Mapping, Coaching, Agile Business Processes, Training, Agile Workshops
Diversity of Industries – Software, Life Sciences, Automotive, Academia, Government/Intelligence 
Global Business and Cultural Relations – Middle East, Asia, Europe, Americas
Executive Management – Executive-level collaboration, Entrepreneurial Leadership, Collaboration/ Innovation, Strategy Development & Implementation