Eric Talle

Biography

My name is Eric Talle. I've spent the past 20+ years working in various businesses across Hewlett Packard/HP Inc. in San Diego, CA.

My early years at HP were spent solving inventory and logistics problems for a large supplies division. And building systems to address the needs to solve those problems. I had to address issues involving many single source vendors supplying a world wide inventory mix to meet high availability of products under highly variable forecasts. I was responsible for roughly $80M in inventory purchase/allocation.

In the late 90's I (along with many) were enticed by the new work in web development. I joined one of the first large scale photo sharing websites (cartogra.com/hpphoto.com). Here was my first job in programming on a large team of developers with more complex requirements and schedules. Though no agile methodology was used at this time, in hind site, I can now appreciate how agile really would have benefited our team.

Around 2005, I moved to the printer division and on to the firmware UI team. Here was my first experience with agile and specifically SCRUM. I entered this division at a time when the organization was struggling with aligning all stakeholders from bottom up. There was little traction gained. I was asked to be SCRUM master of our team of 10 designers, testers and developers without knowing what SCRUM really even was (nor did the organization at that time).

At the suggestion of one of our colleagues, we bought 50 copies of Agile Software Development with Scrum by Schwaber and Beedle and put a copy on everyone's desk and standardized the team on that text. We then had weekly meetings to discuss a chapter from the book to get everyone from tester to VP to align on the benefits, goals and framework, while fine tuning our use of SCRUM on our project. It was my first time really struggling within an organization to achieve alignment across the entire organization.

Within the past 5 years I've been lead developer and SCRUM master on numerous projects from large scale web platforms to mobile apps to micro web services.

I love coaching and mentoring the organization on SCRUM and continually striving to help a team become the best it can. I also have had great opportunities to learn from other experts at HP and within the SCRUM community in San Diego.