Carsten Grønbjerg Lützen

Agile Coach — LEGO Systems A/S

Aug 2021 – Present · Creative Play Lab (on loan until Mar 2023, permanent since Apr 2023)

Agile Coach in Creative Play Lab, the part of the LEGO Group where the LEGO play of five to seven years from now is developed. Early-stage work where the answer genuinely isn't known up front.

I was part of the team behind LEGO SMART Play, launched March 2026: roughly eight years from first research to shelf, hundreds of employees across engineering, supply chain, marketing and design, more than twenty patented world-firsts, and a custom ASIC smaller than a LEGO stud. The LEGO Group positions it as the biggest change to the LEGO System-in-Play since the minifigure in 1978.

• The MVP team: Brought in early to help the MVP team meet the requirements coming at it from downstream. They asked for someone to crack the whip, to which I replied that I didn't think that was what they needed, and that I rarely crack any whip. The mission lead still asked for me; the team itself did not think it needed a coach, so the first job was earning the right to be useful rather than being introduced as the solution. Working alongside the mission lead, built a team coherent and predictable enough for the rest of the programme to plan against: at least twenty-seven consecutive three-week sprints that I facilitated, held to that cadence even while the wider programme ran on four, and most of them ended with a working prototype of the product that had been validated and tested with real children. The sprints ended when the work moved downstream into the stage-gate process the rest of LEGO product development runs on — the right call once the problem had stopped being a discovery problem and become a production problem. Coached the platform teams from that MVP work in 2021 through to the launch.
• Following the platform downstream: The platform was owned in Creative Play Lab until it moved downstream into the product groups. I was asked whether I wanted to follow it, and said yes, because I wanted to be there when it was announced at CES and launched later. Since January 2025 I have worked with the leadership team owning the SMART Play business platform. The team spans interactive play, marketing, technology, scaling, live ops, knowledge management, QA, programme management and strategy. I have worked on aligning workstreams, making sure their work is genuinely coordinated rather than merely reported, and anchoring the programme into the wider business. Marketing and live ops run a four-week Scrum cadence with planning and retrospectives; I restarted Marketing's process together with the Director of Marketing seven months ago and they are now seven sprints in. The other workstreams run processes that suit their own work better, which is the point — though I spar with them when they need input or coaching.
• Repairing working relationships: Restored the working relationship between several leaders and their matrixed product teams. The practical work was getting the right people into a room and making an honest conversation possible, which is usually the thing the situation was missing.
• Ways of working: Established learning loops and agile process across the programme, built around celebration and amplifying what already works rather than cataloguing what doesn't. Used Cynefin and constraint design to help teams separate complicated problems from complex ones and match the approach to the problem.
• Demo of Demos: Took over and redesigned the programme's cross-discipline demo and ran roughly twenty of them at a four-week cadence. 100–200 people in one virtual room, with external partner companies alongside LEGO colleagues. Workstreams showed progress and what they were tackling next, so production equipment, play design, marketing and future research all knew what the others were doing.
• Celebration Days and Learning Days: Facilitate the department's quarterly rhythm. Missions and projects celebrating progress, and sharing what they learned from the stage-gate feedback. Designed a hybrid format that actually works across Billund, London, Singapore, Boston and people at home: walking the room with a gimbal and microphones so remote participants experience the science fair rather than watch it, switching to conference-room framing with a close-up camera for demos. Also facilitate department offsites and coached the teams through an internal hackathon.
• Innovation Campus: Selected as one of Product Development and Marketing's heaviest users of large-group formats to give practitioner input into the Event Space in the LEGO Group's new Innovation Campus. A 50,000 m² building for 1,700 colleagues, opening 2027. Spoke on behalf of everyone due to move in, translating how large workshops actually run into requirements the space had to meet — technology, but also furniture, walls and storage.
• Coaching: Coach product teams, individual contributors, Director-level specialists and a Vice President; mentor Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches. The work covers professional and personal growth alike, because what I am actually after is people being able to bring their whole and authentic selves to work.
• Facilitation beyond the department: Regularly asked to run workshops for Product Groups outside my own department, on the strength of the work rather than any formal remit.
• Training: Design and deliver training alongside the coaching. Two cohorts of the LEGO Group's internal Basic Agile Training, roughly 50–70 colleagues in total. Work I took on because more people understanding agile and Cynefin was worth it, not because it was my primary job. Drawing and visual facilitation training. And, developed and delivered with a colleague, two courses for the SMART Play leadership team: appreciation at work, built on Chapman and White's five languages of appreciation, and a course on listening.
• Recognition: Built recognition rituals and trophies to celebrate achievements, with the explicit aim of protecting time and space for creative work.

Agile Coach, Central Coach Team — LEGO Systems A/S

Nov 2020 – Mar 2023 · Group Business Agility

Part of a central team of Agile Coaches serving the entire LEGO Group, working essentially as internal consultants: short engagements, dropped into whichever part of the business needed to move forward, gone again once it could. That meant HR, Finance, Legal, IT and Product Development. These functions have very different constraints from software, and clients who had to be won over rather than assigned. From August 2021 I was on loan from this team to Creative Play Lab, joining it permanently in April 2023.

• Ran full value-stream retrospectives across the entire IT organisation, bringing in stakeholders from the rest of the business rather than keeping the conversation inside IT
• Supported teams through the COVID period as they moved to distributed working
• Co-designed and ran an internal Liberating Structures workshop introducing colleagues to the methods
• Taught Radical Candor to teams
• Facilitated retrospectives for teams across the organisation
• Asked to help the SMART Play MVP team meet its downstream requirements, an assignment that became an eighteen-month loan and then my permanent role in Creative Play Lab

Scrum Master / Agile Coach — LEGO Systems A/S

Jan 2020 – Oct 2020

Scrum Master for teams building physical, technology-enabled play products. LEGO Education SPIKE Prime and LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor, where firmware, app, curriculum and moulded hardware all had to land together. Ran the full Scrum event cycle, coached teams on empirical process control, and worked with Product Owners on backlog refinement and forecasting.

Software Engineer — LEGO Systems A/S

May 2015 – Dec 2019

Joined a newly formed LEGO Education team with a mandate to change how IT solutions were built, and almost no legacy code to maintain.

• Helped build a new software platform for LEGO Education, from a newly formed team through to production
• Ran LEGO4Scrum workshops in Billund, London and Enfield, teaching Corporate IT what agile was and what it could look like for them
• Progressively took on Scrum Master and facilitation responsibilities for my own and neighbouring teams, which became the full-time role from January 2020

External Lecturer — University of Southern Denmark

Jul 2019 – Mar 2026 · Part time

Taught DM571 Software Engineering, a 10 ECTS course, alongside my full-time role for seven years. Responsible for delivering course material to computer science students and connecting academic software engineering to how the work actually happens in industry, including running LEGO4Scrum with them.

Seven years of teaching this course meant seven years of staying current — you cannot teach software engineering to computer scientists on out-of-date material, and they will tell you if you try.

Founder & Content Creator — AgileIdeas.dk

Aug 2018 – Present · Part time

Independent publishing project on Agile, facilitation and coaching. Its real purpose is to pace my own learning: a weekly deadline means continually finding, testing and explaining tools I don't already use, which is the most reliable way I have found of not going stale. That people watch is a benefit rather than the point. The channel also serves as my graphical facilitation portfolio — the flipchart work is in the videos.

• 420+ short practical videos, published every Thursday for eight years
• 233,000 lifetime views, 8,290 hours watched, 2.4M impressions, 3,690 subscribers
• 5,300+ LinkedIn followers; LinkedIn is the channel's largest single traffic source, by design
• Complete video coverage of all 33 Liberating Structures
• Built and run a free Liberating Structures wall-card generator, backed by its own service. A small tool made for the community rather than for me

Developer → Lead Developer — Fynske Medier / GulogGratis.dk A/S

2007 – Apr 2015

Joined Fynske Medier as a junior developer straight out of high school in 2007, continued as a freelance developer throughout my computer science degree, including as one of the architects behind a full refactor of the site. I finished as Lead Developer for the team behind GulogGratis.dk, one of Denmark's largest classified-ads platforms at the time.