Carissa Zimmerman

Carissa Camden-

            Most people start their introduction to Agile in a professional environment with a new job role or an organization wanting to move towards being high performing. I, however had a bit of a different introduction to Agile and Scrum. My father having spent 20 plus years in software was one of the first people on the Agile bandwagon growing up. As an entrepreneurial spirit, I found my dad discussing requirements and allocation of points to accomplish tasks involved in my early business ventures. From selling beanie babies to running an ice cream truck to pay for college the concepts of Agile were a part of our normal conversations around business and how to measure success. Truthfully, at the time this was quite frustrating as I didn’t understand how working things in a planned order benefitted my plans for business. As I reached my early twenties I found incorporating a team mindset and having a quick daily get together to discuss what was accomplished the day before with intent for the day ahead was quite beneficial. It also appeared to be working as I grew my Amazon business from myself to a peak of 25 full time workers. We had a backlog of tasks worked in priority order and I was always incorporating new ideas and customer feedback into the list. Ironically, although my dad had instilled the concepts of Agile and Scrum into me for years, it wasn’t until I started my corporate career that terms like “backlog” and “scrummaster” became a part of my vocabulary and understanding around what I had been doing in my own businesses since my teens. I’ve been an active member of a scrum team in one form or another since early 2014. First as a business analyst gathering the requirements and then as a scrum master removing impediments and ensuring team success. With a new job came new opportunities including migrating into the role of product owner, which I really enjoy. Dad is still an Agile coach working with fortune 100 companies and I’ve come around enough to thank him for his help in my early days while working to outpace him in the study of all things scrum.