About

Joey Spooner

Joey Spooner

I'm Joey Spooner — a product and operations leader who has spent 20+ years at the intersection of systems, technology, and organizations. These days that means specializing in AI adoption: figuring out why AI deployment stalls at the operating model layer, and building the governance structures and human systems that make it actually stick.

Most recently I was COO at Agile Thinkers, an enterprise effectiveness consultancy. Before that, I led product and community development at Kanban University, where the work touched practitioners across 40+ countries. Earlier in my career I worked on digital modernization for Fortune 500 companies, U.S. government agencies, and research institutions.

I also run EvolvingOrgs, where I publish longer-form thinking and take on advisory work in this space — this site is where the rougher, more experimental stuff lives.

I'm based in Lisbon, Portugal, learning Portuguese, and building things that I find interesting — which is what this site is for.

What I'm thinking about

A few things occupying my attention right now:

  • AI pipelines — how to design, evaluate, and maintain them in ways that actually hold up in production and in organizations
  • Change management and AI — the human and organizational side of AI adoption, which tends to be harder than the technical side
  • Customer discovery and opportunity analysis — particularly the gap between what teams think they know about their customers and what structured discovery actually reveals
  • Photography and drawing — slower, more deliberate ways of seeing things

Speaking

I've been speaking at conferences, meetups, and workshops since 2004 — on Kanban, organizational agility, government modernization, and more recently AI adoption and change management. Past venues include Agile national conferences, Kanban University events in the U.S. and Europe, and government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Labor.

See the full speaking history →

What this site is

Spooner Labs is a place to think out loud and publish experiments across systems, technology, organizations, AI, and whatever else seems worth exploring. The goal is to build and share in the open without the pressure of it all being polished.

Experiments range from rough ideas to live tools. Projects are more complete things I've built or contributed to. Status tags are honest about where things stand.

Contact

The best way to reach me is by email. See the contact page.