Jason Austin

Jason Austin is a Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner at TexasNIC with two successful large projects under his belt. For much of his professional life Jason struggled with finding a direction in which to send his career.  In general, his professional experience included customer support, project management, implementation, and requirements elicitation.  In 2011, Jason was invited, by a former co-worker and now personal friend, to apply at TexasNIC for a business analyst position.  Unbeknownst to him, Jason was entering the wonderful world of Agile project management. In late 2012 Jason was assigned as a business analyst to a scrum team who had just gone live with an eight month long project.  The project was at that time beginning an enhancement phase.  There were actually three teams on the project and they were quite accustomed to scrum practices at that point.  Jason was able to quickly learn the scrum process and found that he very much enjoyed its simplicity and routine. A few months later, Jason was sent to Certified Scrum Product Owner training.  This formal training really opened his eyes to the beauty of the Agile methodology. It also clued him in to the fact that he had been doing most of the Product Owner work for his team for a while. Shortly after taking the business analyst position on his team, the Product Owner retired and Jason assumed all of his duties while waiting for a new Product Owner. Even after hiring a new Product Owner Jason still did most of those duties as the new hire didn’t learn quickly and didn’t even stay around. The team went through three Product Owners in only few months. Jason came to really enjoy the duties of a Product Owner and, a few months later, decided to apply for a Product Owner position on a different team within TexasNIC. Interviews were had and all was looking favorable until the company decided not to fill the posting. The company decided to have some existing people in the company assume the duties of Product Owner in addition to their existing roles. Jason was dubious of this decision. With dreams of being a Product Owner temporarily crushed, Jason applied himself to learning as much about Scrum as possible while executing his role of Business Analyst/Product Owner for his original team. Eventually that project started to wind down and murmurs of the next project started to be heard. It is worth mentioning at this point that Jason’s original project had three teams but did not actually have three Scrum Masters. One of the Scrum Masters was servicing two of the three teams. The new project was meant to have three dedicated Scrum Masters, one for each team. So Jason expressed his interest in Scrum Mastery to his manager who, incidentally, was one of the Scrum Masters on the previous project. His manager thought he would be right for the role and, just like that, Jason became a Scrum Master. Although he doesn’t have a certification for Scrum Master, Jason has been able to excel in the role due, in part, to excellent mentorship by his manager, who has been a Scrum Master for many years. After being in the Scrum Master role for about a year Jason decided it is his favorite role in the Scrum world. He then began the process of applying for his Certified Scrum Professional certification. His goals for the future include getting this certification and eventually moving up to a Senior Scrum Master role in another company.