Who is this for?

If you are an agile coach/scrum master helping teams and team members grow, or a developer working on a team, or a Product Owner… how did you get here? Where do you go from here? How do you relate to your team members? Who are they? How can we work better? How can Jim stop being so annoying? Why is Patricia never listening to what I say? How can I make my PO disappear? How can I help my team become high-performing?

Who is this from?

Hello World! This is Agilist Andre. Back in 2010, I joined a company called SilverSpring Networks (SSN) as a Software Developer. At that time, I had heard of Scrum, but not really much about Agile. Luckily enough, a few months after I joined, the Software department decided to go Scrum! We brought in a trainer, and after three days of workshops, we packed the scrum teams together in big cubes, started having sprints, started measuring velocity–the whole shebang! It just made sense to me. As a team, we planned for each next iteration (we tried 4-, 3-, and 2-week sprints, and decided on the 3-week approach), chose our own work, set our own sustainable pace, we had stories that we easily broke down into tasks, we sized the stories in story points using modified Fibonacci and tasks in ideal hours. At sprint-end, we would review (demo our increment to the Product Owner) and retrospect.

It was far from ideal, our Scrum Master (SM) was our manager (ideally SMs should be the team’s peer, not authority) and as such, was still doing more managerial work rather than SM work. Therefore there was no growth per se in the teams after the initial improvement from adopting Scrum.

In a way, we were ‘doing Agile’ but not ‘being Agile’. We could have done a lot more, but management was satisfied with the results our implementation of Scrum was producing, so they didn’t want to change things up anymore. I was ‘doing Scrum’ and no way I was going to go back to doing Waterfall.

Fast-forward to 2016, I was hired as a Scrum-Master at Mindvalley. Having learned the mechanics of Scrum in my SSN days and having loved the process, I thought I was ready to go! Cliché, but true, but… I was wrong.

And so my ‘agile journey’ started…