Tobias Abarbanell
About
I have been a Software developer and Team lead long time before I knew SCRUM. I must have used many of the agile practices already, without knowing the names of Product Backlog or Sprint Planning. That gave the nice experience that when I learned SCRUM, a lot of these ideas just got names, the dots connected and fell into their logical structure.
SCRUM has been the core of my teams ever since – and it has helped me to deliver big web solutions to a worldwide audience.
After initial success in rolling out SCRUM in our existing offshore team, I had the experience and opportunity to set up local teams in our European business offices using SCRUM in a much more integrated way.
It was one of the great successes to have everybody in the teams participate in functional discussions, design questions, architecture proposals – and have the teams empowered to actually make their decisions without waiting for the approval chain of old times.
I have personally been Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Coach for teams and Management.
During this journey, I have experimented and learned from different models, picking ideas from Scaling Frameworks like SAFe and LeSS while being true to the agile spirit of keeping the process lean and inspecting and adapting all the time. Seeing Conway’s law in action was an eye opener: Which architecture works in which organisation setup, and if they don’t match, which side should you change? If the organisation is growing – how do you on-board new engineers and how do you evolve new teams? Or - How do you help your CFO to budget in a SCRUM world?
SCRUM has been a great learning experience and has helped to make my teams productive with strong alignment to customer value.
Experience and services
-
Career history
- 2017-06-19 - present - Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Agile Coach, Project Manager)
- 2009-06-08 - 2016-10-31 - Frontiers Media SA (CTO)