Stella Ihenacho

Stella Ihenacho once removed every qualification from her CV so she would look less threatening on paper.

It worked.

It also showed her how many brilliant women shrink themselves to fit rooms that were never built for them.

Now she spends her days making those rooms bigger.

Stella is the first Team Lead of the RTE Organization in Red Hat’s Data & AI division, where she shapes assignment strategy, talent alignment, and delivery across the teams building enterprise AI. For more than a decade, she has led enterprise Agile transformations. Today, her focus is what AI changes about how work gets planned, delivered, and led, a conversation she explores through her Agile & AI with Stella series and in her work with leaders navigating the future of work.

She is Co-Founder of NSTAR Technologies, a career acceleration institution that has helped more than 200 immigrant and first-generation professionals build careers in technology. She is also Co-Founder and COO of the African Immigrant Collective (AIM), an organization advancing access, leadership, and economic mobility for African immigrants and the diaspora.

A TEDx speaker and author of five books, Stella has served on the PMI Global Steering Committee that helped shape the updated PMI-ACP examination and is a Scrum Alliance Featured Voice. She is a 2026 Women in Technology Woman to Watch and holds an MBA, a Harvard Certified Agile Leader credential, PSM II, PMI-ACP, and ICP-ACC.

Her message is simple.
English is the new programming language.
Courage is the new credential.