Christopher Lewis

Hello,

I am Chris Lewis, a digital technologist that catches the wave and is never late. I have a passion for interaction design and product management and my expertise ranges from content management to mobile application creation and everything in between. Feel free to contact me for any digital ideas you may have.

I first began my scrum career as a Product Owner for an electrical distribution company and was a part of a team that handled change requests and bug fixes. This was my first time using agile and implementing the practices that I had read about, and I could tell as soon as the project started this company was not ready for agile. During this project I got my first experience with maintaining a backlog, but was also expected to coach the development team or function as a scrum master. Trying to juggle both taught me quickly that the product owner role and the scrum master role should be separate. I found myself being too overbearing, which in the end resulted in less quality work being accomplished and often received defective functionality, all for the sake of “getting it in, on time”.

After my first project as a product owner within an organization, I took another product owner role within an insurance organization that claimed to be making an agile transformation during a site redesign and due to the large size of the organization I figured they were serious with its intentions. In this product owner role, I was responsible for a large backlog, but learned a very valuable lesson as well. The stakeholder must be engaged in the project for the product to be the best that it can be. During this project I reviewed analytics and observed customer surveys and established user stories and design accordingly with UX. The main issue arose when I tried to seek immediate feedback from the stakeholder. She was never available, so the project went into development without a proper approval process. Luckily many of the designs and interactions were accepted post development, but this project taught me to always ask key questions prior to joining a project because an agile mindset starts from the top, so if the leaders within an organization are not fully onboard, they will not hold others within the organization accountable, and thus the process becomes convoluted, which makes it hard to deliver incremental value without the consistent feedback.

Following the insurance company, I joined a telecommunications company and continued as a product owner and this project changed my whole perspective on agile. During this project I grew as a product owner by improving my user story writing skills, understanding how to prioritize user stories better, and participating within a common practice process from a user story draft to working code. During this project I also received both my CSM and CSPO certifications, to gain formal agile training. Interestingly, I found value in the CSM, despite never being in the role up to this point. The CSM class made me identify my weaknesses as a product owner and how those weaknesses affected the development team. During this time, I realized how crucial the product owner is to the overall success of the product (single wringable neck ha).

After experience as a product owner and receiving the CSM certification, I wanted to understand the scrum master role better, so I joined a large ecommerce company as a scrum master. This was a great first experience in the role because most of my scrum team members were co-located in the same building. The proximity of the team members helped me to understand the habits and emotions of a development team member. This is something that I never paid attention to as a product owner and something I may not have been able to discover if my team was remote and this being my first project as a scrum master. This was an excellent team that truly was self-organized which spoiled me as a first-time scrum master. The team demonstrated that if you allow each person to exercise his or her strengths autonomously within common team norms, a project can deliver a quality product working efficiently.

Following my first scrum master experience, I joined a gold mining project where I was the scrum master for three different development teams in three different countries (Australia, India, U.S.), and they were three different vendors. This was a unique challenge, but it taught me many valuable lessons. One, that a scrum master has the great opportunity/responsibility to coach a product owner. Being in a position where you can see the entire scrum process and notice where certain improvements would aid the entire team, allows a scrum master to make powerful suggestions. The second lesion is that collaboration is key especially when it comes to contracts. An organization being stuck with a time and materials contract, means working software is not the main metric, man hours dictate the budget. It also holds the vendors less accountable for working software. Both things mentioned can sink a project and have sunk many projects where I have been a team member.

I am currently functioning wherever I am needed. I am a digital practitioner whose passion is to see great digital experiences be the norm across all industries and whether functioning as a product owner, scrum master, or agile coach, I am a servant to the end customer.