David Nielsen

A natural team builder and coach who is passionate about agile/lean product development and innovation. Enthusiastic about empowering cross-functional teams to solve complex customer problems. Constant improvement, building trust and communication, and promoting healthy conflict, all while having fun, has been my secret sauce to take product and teams from good to great.

As a business analyst for 18 months, I prepared requirements for the scrum team that was incrementally building out a web application workflow tool that allowed back office asset specialists to move high volumes of marketable securities on to and off of the trust account mainframe platform. This was my first experience working on a Scrum team, where I learned the basics of Scrum. Throughout my time there, I took advantage of many opportunities to facilitate Scrum events such as; Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and the Sprint Retrospective. After approximately 50 2-week sprints and acquiring my CSM and CSPO certifications, I decided it was time to move on and take a Scrum Master position at Thomson Reuters. 

At Thomson Reuters I was given the duty of supporting and leading two Scrum teams that were building out the Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence application. This application gave our clients' Compliance Officers the ability to understand their company's risk landscape in the United States and around the globe in regards to current laws and regulations, as well as pending legislation that could affect their business decisions. During my time there I was able to witness these two Scrum teams mature in terms of agility and devops. They were releasing code to production servers every two weeks. The teams also knew the Scrum Guide very well, living and breathing Scrum and Agile practices every moment of the day. While this made my job easier, it helped me to understand the real power of Scrum, Agile practices, devops, continuous integration and continuous delivery. While there I also supported a team of Scrum Masters and helped them to produce release burn-up charts and optimize their use of Jira for reporting. Our Scrum Master community of practice was extremely supportive and effective at helping each other to overcome our individual team hurdles. Together with my colleagues, we attended Scrum Day 2016 and Agile Day 2016 here in Minneapolis.I eventually left Thomson Reuters to take an Agile Coach and Scrum Master position at Unitedhealth Group - Optum.

At Optum, where I am currently today, I have helped to spin up 4 Scrum Teams and support 6 in total as their Scrum Master. I was also the coach for a new Scrum Master on another team. I typically get several questions from across the organization each week as people hear by word of mouth that I am a good resource and able and willing to give advice. I have taken advantage of many training sessions here at Optum, including; User Story and Feature Writing, Role of the Release Train Engineer, Introduction to Agile Funding, ATDD, and more. Also during my time here I have attended an Agile Coach off-site 3-day course through ICAgile and have achieved their ICP-ACC certification. Together with my colleagues, we attended Scrum Day 2017 and Agile Day 2017 in Minneapolis. 

I currently plan on growing my career as a Scrum Master / Agile Coach as this is truly where my passion is. In the future, I would like to look at Agile Leadership positions where I can have even more impact on enhancing organization and product agility.