J. Robie Wood

Supported the CTO in forming new teams as a fintech startup within an innovation Division of AB-Inbev. Grew the organization from a core team of four people to including 15 teams and over 75 Software Developers, DevOps Engineers, and quality assurance professionals.

During the first year, our teams developed and deployed eWallet, electronic payments, and lending products for multiple countries throughout Latin America while meeting initial net revenue and NPS goals.

My activities included organization design, legal and contracts coordination, recruiting and hiring, outside stakeholder management, Product and Design Team coordination, Agile practice development, and Team leadership.

I directly led two feature teams while serving as Release Train Engineer for 18 teams on a project to modernize customer account management for retail banking. This new cloud-based solution was a replacement for on-premises legacy applications and involved significant stakeholder involvement, design thinking, and Agile practices to enable delivery.

During this project, my teams leveraged new technology to build automated testing and production delivery capability while moving to a micro-service architecture that significantly reduced inter-team dependencies and time-to-market for software products.

One of the principal challenges of this project was to implement an approach for engaging designers, product owners, and engineers (development stakeholders) in a new set of DevOps practices made possible by the change in technology.

We accomplished this by influencing and including all development stakeholders in a process redesign that emphasized early, continuous, and iterative involvement of designers and product owners with the teams to build quality consistent with automated regression, integration, and acceptance testing.

Served as a Scrum Master for two teams integrating customer data to ensure one common data source for a retail bank. The teams delivered new account management features for customers. The key challenge on this project was coordinating dependencies with other teams as part of a 20-plus team Agile Release Train (ART).

On this project, several teams developed APIs on which my teams depended to complete and ship their features. We minimized the impact of the bottlenecks related to these dependencies by my close collaboration with the API teams to understand their problems and delivery status, creating and honoring inter-team working agreements, ensuring we had and followed an effective configuration management approach, and building a spirit of cooperation and shared accomplishment across the teams.

My teams became recognized as a brand within the organization due to our family spirit and atmosphere, notable implementation of Agile practices, and ability to deliver quality software at a high rate.

I served as a Scrum Master for a new contractor team assembled to convert existing mobile applications to support languages other than American English. The team was a full stack, including back-end, iOS, Android engineers and two quality assurance specialists. The biggest challenge we faced was coordinating the teams’ activities with twelve other mobile feature teams.

Our team was focused on not breaking the build by introducing a problem into an already working application. The added challenge we had was to effectively organize the activities within our team since we were split between local members and members offshore in India.

In coordinating with the other feature teams, we focused our attention on regression and integration testing, where we formally met for reviews of test cases, test data sets, and actual testing results.

We also overcame the distributed team challenge by extensive use of video conferencing and organizing our schedule to overlap our daily standup and an additional hour of team problem-solving time or various team celebrations.

We also used an automated backlog management tool to support tracking work and managing our work-in-progress across the time zones.

As a consultant, I led the effort to change the software development practices for this project. The need was to overcome the project stagnation that had set in and develop working software. The project had been in the requirements-gathering phase for over three years and had only delivered a two-foot stack of use cases.

To get the process moving, I influenced the contracting firm and the US Forest Service team to adopt Scrum-defined roles and practices. I provided stakeholder training and began working with the product owners to mine the use cases to identify an initial set of epics and user stories (which formed the first product roadmap for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

We formed two Agile teams to accomplish the work and delivered our first potentially shippable increment within two sprints. The Forest Service client was astonished to see working software so quickly after spending many years compiling requirements. They also discovered the value of iterating, as the initial use cases did not represent what they wanted. The teams went on to deploy the solution MVP within ten months and, from there, began iterating on enhancements and additional features.