Agile 2013

This week, I’m at the Agile Alliance conference in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m excited to share my experience and learnings with everyone.

First, introductions: I’m a Product Manager in Nordstrom Direct where I drive Customer Replenishment, Waitlist, and Returns Reduction for our eCommerce business.

I am an avid Agile advocate and served on the Nordstrom Agile Transformation Working Team. I started practicing Agile 10 years ago as a technical consultant, mostly using XP and then later incorporating Scrum delivery practices.  My first Agile project wasn’t a typical software development project; it was an 8-week vendor evaluation. The experience taught me what it meant to be disciplined and show results frequently. I ended up spending nearly 2 years with that client on 4 different Agile projects and I learned to value gathering feedback continuously and incorporating that feedback iteratively, traveling with lightweight documentation, creating shared understanding through conversation, and instilling ownership through team-lead demonstrations.

I got some Agile experience under my belt but it wasn’t until my next project that I really learned what ‘being Agile’ meant. I was working on a project to build a commerce-type engine and micro-site WCM that would be used to launch education about ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005. I learned the most about Agile from this engagement because of the team. I got absorbed by the values that the team not only passionately practiced but also embraced. I appreciated discussion and discourse about the Agile methodologies and I came to realize that Agile wasn’t about ceremony and practices but about the values and the team dynamic. I haven’t looked back since.

I could talk Agile for days so I’m pretty jazzed to be going to the Agile 2013 conference. What I’m hoping to get out of the conference: Understand how to better feed & plan at the Portfolio & Program level and manage the pipeline to Releases and Teams.