Cait Pelly

Cait Pelly

Cait Pelly became a Certified Scrum Master in 2015, but her journey in Scrum started in 2012: when the team she was working with as a QA Tester decided to ditch their verbose upfront requirements documentation and accept that they couldn’t predict everything up front.

She’d spent years before then internally questioning why things were done, why these gates in the software development lifeycle existed. Scrum, with its emphasis on inspection and adaptation gave her the opportunity to start changing how things worked around her. Having come from traditional waterfall projects, she was used to plans falling apart near the end, when QA was most heavily involved. She was keen to change this in particular.

Whereas before she would focus on making her QA process better, now the focus could shift onto the whole Scrum team. She wanted to put herself in a position to make things better for her QA brethren and Scrum gave them that chance. She spent the next couple of years working within her organisation to evangelise Agile and Scrum and bring about change. Initially the desire to improve came from a selfish place, to make her job less stressful as QA. But what she learned along the way was that being part of a team that can build something from nothing but ideas and wishes was a much greater reward. Being part of a Scrum team, where the focus was on creation, was starkly different from the traditional Waterfall QA teams she had been a part of: where the focus was on ‘breaking’ the product. This change of mindset that Scrum brought to her was uplifting, inspiring and made her want to delve deeper into the world of helping these new, creative teams become the best they can be.

She took on her first Scrum Master role in December of 2014, performing a dual-role as QA embedded within the development team. It was a confusing position, but having an intimate knowledge about how the development process worked and where the flaws were, she could apply her QA mindset to working out where the flaws in the development process were. The products they were working on really concentrated on Lean principles and she learnt a lot about MVPs and the value of having something to show potential customers in order to gather valuable feedback.

The next job she held, she started as a QA Analyst and took on the Scrum Master role within a week. She worked with a team who fitted into a larger group that was mostly based in the Czech Republic. The product she worked on was the first totally new product the business had created in many years and there was a great reception from their existing customer base. She worked with the team to coach them on how to adopt Scrum values and helped them through their ongoing efforts to become more Agile. The feedback loop that had already been established through the existing customer base made this much easier to see immediate value in incremental delivery. Eventually, as these things usually go, the company opted to bring the development into the main development hub in Prague. She didn’t blame them, there was increasingly less sense in having the work split across geographies and they had all the skills needed in the very talented teams in the Czech Republic. This role taught her a lot about having a Product Owner who had a close relationship with the customers. The Product Owner also worked in Business Development, so had intimate knowledge of the customers, however it did mean that he was travelling around the world constantly. They made it work as best they could, because when they tried having him in-house they weren’t getting the feedback they needed from end users. It was a great lesson that sometimes you have to make compromises to do what works best for your team.

She joined what was Privax at the time in January 2016, as a QA Tester within a team of web developers. The team was attempting to adopt Scrum without some of the key roles like a Product Owner or a Scrum Master. They asked Cait after her first week to take on the Scrum Master role and she leapt at the chance to help influence the transformation. She started to realise that in a company so new to Scrum, she needed to take on the role full time, so she managed to move full time into the Scrum Master role. The team had many stakeholders and this was the biggest challenge for them in terms of weighing up priorities, especially as they didn’t have a Product Owner. The team went through a few different Product Owners in her time with them. The problem with their stakeholders was compounded by the fact that the company was acquired not once, but twice within a year. The final six months she spent with what was Avast by that time was spent on a project to deconstruct the service they had created with Privax. They needed to integrate it with Avast’s new service, based upon an amalgamation of the two technologies which would be further supported by their teams in the Czech Republic. It was a devastating time for many: most of the development team had been with Privax throughout the startup years. It was at this time she got into coaching techniques, to keep people motivated and focussed and help them think about what they were going to do next. They successfully delivered the new product by using Scrum and it was a great lesson in how to use Scrum in a fixed-time project. She also help to facilitate some experiments using Kanban during this time and this was a great lesson in how to utilise other frameworks.

She joined Discover in September 2017, taking on her first full time Scrum Master role from the offset. It gave her a new-found energy for her coaching and access to a community of Scrum Masters. Where before she had been a single Scrum Master in the studio now she had a whole support network, along with Agile Coaches who were available as mentors. The company really appreciates the importance of Scrum Masters and it was her first experience of a business practicing Scrum at scale.

Today Cait works at Discover and has become more involved in the Scrum community, not just relying on the online communities but attending meetups and user groups. She has also gained her CSPO qualification, an experience that not only helped her to understand the role of the PO in more detail, but gave her the opportunity to speak to Product Owners from many different backgrounds. She highly recommends Product Ownership training to any Scrum Masters wanting to gain more empathy with the POs they work with.