⬤ better change
Russell Hill
Trainer & Coach · Better Change
+49 151 1564 9226
📍Berlin, Germany
🇬🇧 EN · 🇩🇪 DE
Russell Hill is a senior trainer, enterprise coach, and consultant who helps organisations improve how they lead and deliver in complex environments — with a clear focus on sustainable change and measurable outcomes. He combines deep technical roots with senior leadership experience and top-tier consulting exposure, making him equally comfortable with board-level conversations and the realities of day-to-day delivery.
His leadership background includes senior roles in the Microsoft/MSN ecosystem, culminating as Head of Technology and Projects at ninemsn in Australia, where he led around 60 engineers and managers. He later brought that perspective into consulting as a Senior Agile Coach and Trainer at McKinsey & Company in Berlin.
Today, Russell specialises in Flight Levels and Kanban as pragmatic, scalable approaches to connect strategy to execution. He hosts Berlin's Kanban Flight Club community and is a regular conference speaker.
Background & expertise
With over 30 years of professional experience spanning technology leadership, enterprise consulting, and agile coaching, Russell brings an unusually broad perspective to organisational change. He has worked across Australia, the UK, and Germany — in software businesses, large corporates, and start-ups — which means he understands that context shapes what works.
His consulting work at McKinsey & Company gave him exposure to transformation challenges at scale, working with leadership teams who needed not just better processes but better ways of thinking about strategy, prioritisation, and organisational design.
Approach
Russell's coaching and training work is grounded in the belief that most organisational problems are system problems, not people problems. His job is to help organisations see the system clearly, design better ones, and build the capability to keep improving — so that changes stick after the engagement ends.
Specialities
Enterprise agility at scale|Flight Levels|Kanban Method|Strategy-to-execution alignment|Operating model design|Leadership coaching|Facilitation|Flow metrics|Organisational design|Culture change|Distributed teams|Agile transformation
⬤ Upcoming training courses
Flight Levels System Architecture (FLSA)
A systemic approach to agile transformation at scale. See your organisation holistically and implement lasting improvements to overall agility.
Flight Levels Introduction (FLIN)
A lightweight and entertaining introduction to the core concepts and principles of Flight Levels. The prerequisite for all FL workshops.
⬤ latest articles
Discover How a Rapid Growing Business Regained Focus
In this webinar our fellow, Russell Hill shares the journey of an online legal services company that experienced a major outage - a 'black week' - due to rapid growth and technical debt.
The Start-Up That Said Agile Didn't Work — and Then Changed Its Mind
A 45-person start-up in targeted advertising had tried Scrum for two years and concluded it was useless. The solution wasn't more Agile theory. It was focus on the organisational challenges, and deliberately push the approach to the back seat.
Flight Levels in Practice: The Five Activities That Make It Work
Flight Levels is a thinking model for organisational agility, not a process framework. Its five key activities — define outcomes, visualise, create focus, establish interactions, improve — are what translate the thinking into actual change.