LEADERSHIP · TEAMS · CULTURE · AI READINESS
With over 20+ years of experience coaching leaders and teams at world-class organizations, we help deliver better outcomes through smarter experiments, clearer alignment, and a culture of continuous improvement.
We favor outcomes over frameworks — no jargon required.
Empowering the people that power your organization
Our experience
MLB Advanced Media
The New York Times
Zapier
Newsweek
Cherre
Tapad
Catalyst
Bitly
Valtech
WHAT WE DO
Three ways we help you move forward
🧭
Executive & Leadership Coaching
We work directly with senior leaders and executive teams to sharpen decision-making, improve communication across functions, and build the habits that sustain high performance — including navigating AI adoption as an organizational challenge, not just a technical one.
1:1 executive and leadership coaching
Cross-functional alignment workshops
Transparent value stream communication
AI adoption readiness for leadership teams
⚡
Team Effectiveness & Delivery
We embed directly with delivery teams to identify obstacles and friction, reduce dependencies, and redesign workflows and processes so that value reaches customers faster and more predictably.
Delivery diagnostics and workflow mapping
Dependency and handoff optimization
Cross-team coordination design
Retrospectives and continuous improvement rituals
🌱
Organizational Design & culture
We help organizations build the structures, incentives, and rituals that sustain improvement over time — aligning how people are motivated with what the business actually needs and creating the experimentation muscle required to find success during change.
Culture and incentive audits
Value-stream aligned team restructuring
Innovation and experimentation frameworks
Change management and sustainability planning
Practitioner. Coach. Strategic Partner.
About Agile Alpaca
Dan Alcalde has spent more than two decades helping organizations unlock high performance — blending deep practitioner experience with human-centered coaching to bridge silos and create lasting change. He has worked with world-class brands including Zapier, The New York Times, Newsweek, MLB Advanced Media, Catalyst, Bitly, and Tapad in a myriad of roles spanning agile coaching, program management, and executive advisory.
Dan's superpower is connection: linking technology, product, and business functions to create an environment of transparency, alignment, and strategic clarity needed for high-performing organizations. He meets people where they are and guides them toward where they want to be — without mandating frameworks or adding unnecessary overhead.
As AI reshapes how work gets done, Dan’s empirical, adaptive philosophy is perfectly suited to the moment: run small experiments, learn fast, and build the human infrastructure that makes every investment — including AI — pay off.
Why Agile Alpaca?
Alpacas are intelligent, adaptable animals known for their sure-footedness on challenging terrain and their ability to work well in groups without being aggressive. They're resilient without being rigid, collaborative without being hierarchical, and they move with intention rather than speed for speed’s sake. That's exactly the philosophy behind this consultancy: adaptability over dogma, collaboration over control, and steady progress over dramatic transformation theater.
In a world full of corporate eagles and lions, an alpaca is a lot more approachable — and a lot less likely to eat you.
AI-Ready Leadership
Executive Coaching
Scrum & Kanban
Agile & Lean
Product Management
Program Management
Team Coaching
Organization Change Management
Continuous Improvement
Facilitation
Small Experiments Beat Big Rollouts
How We Work
Every engagement is deliberately scoped, measurable, and built to create lasting internal capability. Our goal is always to make ourselves unnecessary.
Diagnose the Real Problem
We never assume we knows what’s wrong before looking. Every engagement begins with honest discovery — 1:1 interviews, team observation, and workflow analysis.
Through this we can surface the underlying issues and not just the presenting symptoms.
1
Design a Focused Intervention
We propose the smallest change that could produce meaningful improvement. Success is defined in business outcomes — delivery speed, decision quality, team confidence — before any work begins.
2
Embed, Facilitate, and Iterate
We work alongside your team, not above it. We facilitate retrospectives, coach in real time, and adapt the approach based on what the new information the team surface’s during the engagement — not what the original plan assumed.
3
Transfer And Build Sustainability
Every engagement ends by building internal muscle. We document what worked, coach internal champions, and hand off the tools and habits your team needs to keep improving without us.
4
The AI Opportunity
AI Amplifies Human Coordination — For Better or Worse
AI agents are increasingly capable of executing tasks at speed. But they operate within systems that humans design, govern, and direct. The question of what to build, for whom, and why remains stubbornly human.
Leaders who invest in AI without first building clear communication, tight feedback loops, and honest decision-making habits will find their dysfunction moves faster — not slower. Our empirical, people-first approach is exactly the foundation AI-ready organizations need.
Get In Touch
Let’s Start with A chat
Every engagement begins with a conversation. Tell us what’s getting in the way, and we’ll tell you honestly how we may be able to help. No pitch, no pressure.
Just a straight conversation about what you’re facing and what we can do to help move your and your organization forward.
Send us a message
What People Are Saying
“Dan’s kindness and empathy paired with his deep understanding of agile methodologies are unparalleled and are an incredible asset to the teams he works with. I can say, without a doubt, that Dan has played a very important role in my own career growth and modeled empathy and productivity structures in a way that I will carry with me for the rest of my career.”
— Engineering Manager“When senior management is unsure how to proceed, Dan has the ability to cut through the confusion and present a clear roadmap to resolution. Dan helps his team to intelligently strategize next steps ensuring both happy clients and development team members. He is a pleasure to work with and an excellent mentor. Should your organization be given the opportunity to work with Dan in any capacity, take it.”
— Gen AI Consultant“Dan is a great asset for any organization. He enables teams to operate more efficiently, consistently identifying how they can improve and helping them in the process. He is very knowledg[able] and always able to support his argument with trustworthy material and proven studies.”
— Senior Director of Engineering“[M]y first take was to set up a brand new team. I worked with Dan from the get-go to make sure we were setting this team up for success. He facilitated workshops on agile methodologies, helping us choose the right one for our team’s mission … He helped me set up the team’s delivery and health metrics so we could ensure we were tracking in the right direction on all the things that were essential to our success. Someone like Dan can help your team and your company’s potential multiply.”
— Engineering Leader“[Dan] was instrumental in putting into places the processes our product/engineering teams needed to grow from just a handful of engineers to having dozens of engineers. To many, agile may seem like a set of overwrought rules and process for process sake, but Dan taught me that the true meaning of agile is about communication and conflict resolution. He also showed us that each team could have a different, unique process depending ont he needs of the team and their stakeholders and that teams should have just as much process as necessary to keep things functional — but no more than that.”
— CTO“Dan has helped our team be more connected, focused, and directed in our work. There’s never a mandate or a must from Dan, instead he shares what’s worked for other teams and nuggets of agile wisdom which have coaxed our team into gradually working into more agile-y, delivering more value to customers, and building a better team.”
— Engineering Manager