Sebastian Lange

YOU are the culture. Model the behaviour you want to see!
(Henrik Kniberg / crisp)

My first contact with Scrum was in spring 2013 when I became the first Scrum Master at ePages. It started with online articles and a 2-day Scrum basics training by it-agile. During the company's "revolutionary-style" change from waterfall to Scrum I mentored multiple Scrum teams at the same time and implemented the Scrum rituals of Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Backlog Refinement and Retrospectives. We tracked our process using Burn-Down-Charts and measuring Story-point-based velocity and we added Sprint goals to stay more focussed.

Moreover, I initiated a Scrum of Scrums to deal with legacy code issues, high bug rates and incidents and pushed forward the implementation of Community Of Practice for JavaScript, Perl and Design. I read the Agile Retrospectives book by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen as well as Essential Scrum by Kenneth S. Rubin. Retrospectives and our Sprints became much more effective and fun that way. In Sprint 2014 I took part in a Certified Scrum Master training in Hamburg.

Other achievements include the cross-team organization for dealing with end customer tickets and quality issues while still enabling the teams to focus in their Sprints, merging Quality Assurance into the teams, setup and participate in a Transition Team for implementing change, organize "joint" Scrum rituals for the Sprint Planning and Sprint Review with multiple teams together and setup cross-location communication via video conferencing

When joining LOVOO I took over 5 Scrum teams from the former Scrum Master. It took some weeks to implement more discipline with shorter, timeboxed and much more efficient Scrum rituals. My experience with fun retrospectives boosted detection and fixing team impediments and soon we implemented a bigger change from component ("platform") teams into cross-functional teams. Together with a new colleague we organized this with a transition team with the CTO backing us.
Later together with another new Agile Coach colleague we implemented a 3-team LeSS implementation. But for us the results of evaluation lead to a different way: we implemented more autonomous, creative and self-organizing teams with a very lean and strict cross-team process of: a "Preview" (think of an cross-team Sprint Planning 1), a "Showtime" (cross-team Sprint Review and Tech Talk) and a Community Day (format for gathering LeSS-like communities).

In the further course at LOVOO I acted as Head of Agile, leading 4 Scrum Masters as a mix of manager and agile coach. While my people focused on their Scrum and Kanban teams my own working field changed to a cross-team “flight level”. I coached my Scrum Masters, the other Heads in the tech are and the VP for the whole product development about agile roadmapping, integrating a product discovery workflow into our teams, coordination of software releases as well as removing obstacles that prevent our cross-functional Scrum teams to be motivated, autonomous and self-organizing.

After setting LOVOO on a successful path to achieve its goals by means of agility, I decided to take on a new task at MediaMarktSaturn. Here, the focus was on implementing remote work in international mixed Scrum teams across multiple time zones, introducing business agility tools using JIRA Structure and JIRA Portfolio/Advanced Roadmaps, and supporting an OKR rollout. The sheer size of the company was new to me, but was a lot of fun. Many new areas of knowledge were added, such as supporting the establishment of DevOps, establishing Liberating Structures, Causal Loop Diagrams, Wardley Mapping, as well as End-to-End Test Automation.

Other achievements worth mentioning are creating and offering company-wide trainings for Agile basics, Scrum, Kanban, User Story splitting and an Elephant Carpaccio workshop. I introduced estimation techniques Planning Poker and Magic Estimation to my teams, trained two new Scrum Masters from scratch and I regularly co-facilitate Agile Meetups in Dresden. In 2015 I visited the Scrum Day and later the Global Scrum Gatherings in Prague and then in London as well as the first LeSS conference in Amsterdam. Moreover I successfully participated in Certified Scrum Product Owner as well as Advanced Certified Scrum Master trainings. From 2020 on I focused more on Flight Level Kanban and especially scaling frameworks such as SAFe, LeSS and Nexus.