Steve Pippin

Steve Pippin

Ranging from some teams using Kanban to most teams in the same organization using true scrum methods, I would consider VGT as an advanced organizational adopter and practitioner of Agile across the board. VGT has always utilized the foundational ceremonies to support our scrum practices such as the daily standup, retrospectives, sprint planning and grooming.

In my role as a Product Owner- I have been a daily practitioner of Agile methodologies for almost 5 years. It includes experiences in Kanban, Scrum and a mixture of the two -ScrumBan. Within VGT, we have weekly or bi-weekly planned Community of Practice meetings where we work together to share experiences, results, and how cultivate continuous improvement in both our scrum role as well as the process as a whole. Ideas that included changing our sprint duration, proper ways to ensure that stories are decomposed, following the INVEST structure to ensure our stories are ready to work, defining definitions of ready and done, and planning strategies -including identifying dependencies- just to name a few.

My current role as a Product Owner also includes mentoring other Product Owners and guiding how the role interacts and contributes from the team level to an organizational level. In my history, I have been a Product Owner to five teams at once before with the average being 2-3 teams during my tenure.

To help round out my role as a Product Owner, I believe that understanding the aspects of Product Management is equally as important to not only deliver product to the market, but delivering the right product with the right understanding of business value to all stakeholders. I have incorporated Pragmatic Marketing training (level VI certified) to help tie these aspects of Product Ownership all together.