Professional
I am currently partnering with scrum.org - fulfilling the scrum master accountability for their teams internally. Connect with me and send a message on linkedin or contact me directly to discuss your needs.
Education and the start of my career
I went to the Milwaukee School of Engineering where I completed a BS in Computer Engineering. I worked on campus as a Resident Advisor, an English as a Second Language tutor, and a Learning Resource Center tutor for advanced Calculus, Physics, and Engineering courses. During my sophomore year I participated in a “Bug Stomp” event one weekend - where teams of students used, tested, and investigated the functionality of several demo software products with limited visibility grey-box code bases. The goal of each team was to discover the most issues, document them, and attempt to reverse engineer how and why they occurred. This was basically an intro to Software QA/Test Engineering gamified in a group setting. In the aftermath of this event I started my career with an internship in Test Engineering with a focus on automation at Direct Supply. I continued working part time during the school year and (more than) full time over the summers until graduating, wherein I took a full-time position as a Software Test Engineer.
Growing and My First Startup Experience
Over the next several years I continued to gain skills, knowledge, and experience in test automation and software development roles at Zywave, Centare, and Health Payment Systems. I am especially thankful for the experience gained while working with Vesuvius Technologies - a start-up at the time where we built and operated an auction website. The experience of being part of a tiny team building a new product, rolling it out, managing the support and being involved in customer service directly, going to datacenters and managing our own hardware (pre azure and aws ubiquity!), learning about and implementing data-warehousing, dimensional modeling and the Kimball methods, all contributed to a base understanding and experience with product development and team dynamics that have been a great foundation for my professional growth since then.
Consulting, Coaching, Leadership, and Scrum Mastering
I am very fortunate to have spent several years working at Centare - a consulting company that offered full software development teams as a service as well as delivered agile and scrum training and coaching engagements. I took on a leadership role within their Development Center side of the business (the full development team services wing of the company), as well as fulfilling the scrum master accountability for many of the teams - and staying involved with development and testing activities as my teams, clients and projects needed. The consulting model that Centare had in place allowed me the opportunity to work with over 20 different client companies - from several small startups that needed help implementing their first product, to some of the largest companies in the world (Siemens, GE, Johnson Controls, etc...)
Startup and Pandemic
I have since had several great opportunities to continue growing and learning - including while helping to build and lead the development teams at a startup focused on creating a health-data platform that pivoted into covid symptom monitoring and workplace compliance reporting during the pandemic. We built and launched a product, onboarded users and customers, and supported the product through growth from 0 to 20,000 monthly active users and from 0 to over 6-figures in monthly revenue (and our company internally growing from 5 total people when I joined to 80 employees two and a half years later). The leadership, technical, and process challenges through this were a great addition to my experience.
scrum.org
I am currently partnering with scrum.org - fulfilling the scrum master accountability for their teams internally. I have some limited availability to engage in coaching, mentoring, or consulting capacities in the realms of product development, organizational agility, leadership, team and organizational process, and more. If you are interested in having a conversation to see if we are the right fit for each other, connect with me and send a message on linkedin or contact me directly.