Doug Snyder

Doug Snyder has been an enthusiastic practitioner of Scrum since transitioning from Project Manager to Scrum Master at the beginning of 2011. Since 2016, he has held the internal Agile Coach position at Medical Mutual of Ohio.

During Doug's tenure at SIRVA, a commonly repeating impediment across his teams was the quality of user stories and acceptance criteria being delivered to the teams. As the primary Agile Coach at the organization, Doug moved into the Product Owner role for a year to spearhead the introduction, training and implementation of specification by example, which led to dramatic improvements to user story and acceptance criteria allowing development teams to improve both quality and productivity.

Doug won multiple leadership awards while at SIRVA. These awards emanated from nominations from peers, managers and internal customers to recognize associates who demonstrate leadership behaviors on a daily basis. Doug’s 2014 award for “Possess Position Specific Knowledge and Skills” included the statements:

• “Doug is likely the most knowledgeable person on scrum methodology in our company. He utilizes all tools available, is constantly researching new techniques and is willing to train anyone interested…”
• “Doug works tirelessly to track the team burndown charts and statistics, watches for trends and has many tough conversations on what is working and what isn’t. Another unique quality of Doug’s is his drive to make every facet of the scrum process effective and meaningful.”
• “The retrospective meetings can become monotonous but Doug has a different approach to the meeting each time – sometimes incorporating learning workshops and activities, sometimes having a more pragmatic conversation. He caters this meeting to the mood and performance of the team to ensure they get the most out of each one. ”

Other nomination submissions for this award remarked

• “ He has held many Brown Bag sessions for the IT Relocation team to help us all grow as a department…”
• “ Doug helps to stretch the team outside their comfort zone by trying Test Driven Development and learning new skills…”

Doug’s 2012 award for “Leads People Effectively” indicated:

• “As the Scrum Master, he deeply understands how Scrum works and guides the team to find solutions to help the team succeed.”
• “He helps the team…find alternatives or different approaches to issues.”
• “He is always focused on the team, not on himself.”

Other nominations for the “Leads People Effectively” award declared:

• “Doug is a consistently excellent leader, simultaneously motivating and helping his team members to achieve their best…”
• “…always researching new techniques for his team to perform tasks more efficiently, identify impediments, and solve problems preventing his team from delivering…”
• “He appreciates and acts upon feedback from his team, while tempering the expectations of both management and team members.”
• “He has the trust and respect of his team members, cultivating a symbiotic relationship that ensures a positive work environment.”
• “He has a personal interest and involvement in his team, and manages them with dignity and respect…”

As a Scrum Master in 2014 coaching two different teams operating in the “Ha” stage of Shu Ha Ri, Doug introduced the teams to the RoboScrum method first documented by Jeff Sutherland and Scott Downey in the Agile 2010 experience report “Scrum Metrics for Hyperproductive Teams: How They Fly Like Fighter Aircraft.” The teams chose to try this method experimentally, leading to acceleration and velocity improvements for both teams by monitoring the metrics associated with this method. The desire to improve upon these metrics caused the team to incorporate other published work patterns such as swarming, daily clean code, and a rededication to illegitimus non interruptus.

During 2014, Doug was also responsible for creating the curriculum and presenting a three day Scrum Bootcamp for teaching the framework across the organizations entire development staff from each U.S. location not yet using Scrum. Forty associates attended this class and participated in the Lego city exercise to experience what it felt like to be part of a scrum release. This class received great feedback from the attendees.

As a product owner in 2015, Doug partnered with the business to introduce specification by example. With improved user stories and acceptance criteria being delivered to the development team, these efforts resulted in a 33% increase in velocity and 50% decrease in defects generated within the development iterations for the pilot team. This effort included:

• use of speclog for story mapping and documentation of acceptance criteria,
• integration with TFS for creating Gherkin-based feature files and development of specflow acceptance tests,
• generation of living documentation with Relish