Kyle King

I was initially introduced to Scrum in the summer of 2011, at an extremely large company called

Rockwell Automation. I understood a bit about design and development, but the roles and

responsibilities of a Product Owner and Scrum Master were wildly new to me. I became

enamored with the Product Owner’s ability to understand and advise the product from so many

perspectives. They understood the business value, they rallied developers around the product

vision, they visited our customers and were able to articulate all of this to the executives and

stakeholders. I walked away from Rockwell knowing exactly what my next position would be.

At WebPT, I saw Scrum at its “young adult” stage, being honed in on as the company grew out

of its own startup phase. Here, I saw Scrum and agile development at a much closer level –

without committees and sub-committees making the actual decisions ten-thousand feet up, which

was mostly true at Rockwell.

I also learned much more about the true tasks of a Scrum Master, and became very close with my

own SMs.

After joining Coplex, I saw that we had Scrum teams – engineers, designers, testers,

and product owners – but we did not have a single Scrum Master. With the company vision

leaning towards venture-backed startups and preaching lean left and right, there was no

convincing needed to fill the obvious gap. A fellow project manager and I became fully-certified

at a two-day workshop, and the ship has been smoother ever since.