Craig Purcell

Craig Purcell started out as a human factors engineer with Motorola in 1995. Since then he has moved through a number of disciplines including software and systems engineering, research within the EU funding collaboration programmes, and managed service design and delivery.

His experience with scrum started in 2008 when, on moving into a software development department, found the engineers eager to embrace scrum as a way to get out of the waterfall model hell they were in. With a background in human factors, its user first foundation made perfect sense.

Those early days of scrum followed a similar path to many new to the framework, but the successes were enough to keep going. Formal CSM training for the entire team followed, and then requests to train teams in Singapore in China. It was new, exciting and fun.

One thing that was missing was real product management commitment to scrum. The role of the product owner was not represented - often taken by those with little interest in the development team, or too much interest in the technical. You have a problem when your product managers have no interest in using the product.

In 2011 Craig decided to take on the role of product owner - becoming an interface between end user, business and developer and attempting to drive real value back into the product. Formal CSPO training took place in 2013. Using the CSPO role with lean startup principles has produced excellent results very early in product lifecycles.

Craig takes pride in delivering great products to users and challenges everyone to do things better every day.