Johan Havenga

I have spent most of my career in the space between product and engineering.

Product

Management decides what gets built and Engineering decides how; Product Operations looks after the processes and visibility in between. That is the work I now do at Powerfleet, and it is the work I want to keep doing.

It is unglamorous and useful: finding where delivery is quietly losing time and quantifying it rather than repeating the complaint, triaging it so every item has a named owner, and fixing the system rather than the symptom. Alongside it I lead Powerfleet's Scrum Master function — a team of Scrum Masters supporting roughly 23 teams and 180 developers across multiple countries, cultures and time zones. Silos are the default state of an organisation that size, so keeping them broken down is a daily job rather than a transformation project.

I started as a developer in 2007 and moved into Scrum Mastery in 2012, which is a good part of why the handover between product and engineering interests me — I have worked both sides of it.

My working assumption after fourteen years: most delivery problems look like people problems and turn out to be process problems wearing a disguise.

Product Operations Lead at Powerfleet (2026-06 – Present)

I own the machinery between Product and Engineering — the cross-team processes, visibility and decision records nobody else holds. I find where delivery loses time and quantify it, triage it with named owners, and fix the system rather than the symptom.

• Built an executive view of engineering work in flight, giving leadership a clear picture of what teams are actually working on.
• Run a delivery-efficiency programme spanning QA capacity, release communication and refinement quality.
• Wrote the playbook for initiating new projects, standardising how work enters the delivery system.
• Established a durable knowledge layer so decisions outlive the meetings that made them.
• Lead the Scrum Master function supporting 20 delivery teams.

Senior Scrum Master & Agile Coach at Powerfleet (2022-08 – 2026-05)

• Led a team of Scrum Masters supporting 20+ multi-cultural teams across diverse time zones and countries.
• Worked closely with Product to keep the ingestion pipelines into the teams flowing and correctly prioritised.
• Served as Jira Administrator and custodian of the company SDLC, from idea through execution to delivery.
• Managed synchronisation and a unified working culture across teams separated by geography and time zone.

Senior Principal Consultant at IQbusiness South Africa (2018-07 – 2022-08)

Deployed to Woolworths Head Office

• Scrum Master to three teams delivering for the Foods and Clothing divisions, and Agile Coach to other areas of the business.
• Worked across the ITS product space, and stepped into a Project Manager capacity to close out the implementation of a PLM system.

Scrum Master at MiX Telematics (2016-07 – 2018-06)

• One of a team of Scrum Masters serving multiple development streams of varying function and size.
• Worked in close collaboration between Product Owner, Business Analyst and development teams.
• Combined the Scrum Master role with a Product Owner role for the final six months.

IT Project Manager / Scrum Master / Lead Developer at PSG (2013-09 – 2016-06)

• Managed software development projects, later broadening to the roll-out of off-the-shelf packages to the business.
• Scrum Master and Agile Coach to the internal development stream, the BI team and an external development stream.
• Jira and SharePoint administrator, and system owner for the internally developed HR systems.

Scrum Master / Lead Developer at PSG Konsult (2012-09 – 2013-09)

Lead Developer at PSG Konsult (2009-06 – 2012-09)

PHP Developer at PSG Konsult (2007-10 – 2009-06)

Web Developer at MAXITEC (2004-12 – 2007-10)

National Diploma in Information Technology – University of South Africa (2011-01 – 2013-01)

– University of Stellenbosch (2002-01)

Matric – Hermanus High School (2000-01)