This Was My Agile Year
2016 is almost over and is a good moment to make a full year retrospective. On January, I completed 3 months of living in Mexico City. The main reason to move in from Querétaro was an exciting job at Segundamano as their Agile Coach. Also, the opportunity to participate more at the Ágiles México Community. So, this is what happened:
At the beginning of the year at Segundamano, we started to work on the challenge of deliver the “whole slice”. This is a shift on the mindset and the foundation of the principles working software and delivering value. I teammate with some leaders to guide all dev team. A complete reflection can be found here. Also I participated at the organization of the Hackamano, Segundamano’s Hackaton open for all the public. With nearly 200 participants, I feel honored and happy to see all the enthusiastic participation and great ideas of the teams. Then, I started a Time Management courses, aimed to all the company. Learn how to take responsibility of our time is a habit hard to change. I feel proud of the few people who still uses Kanban Personal or Pomodoro :)
When the year began, the Ágiles México community had the goal to organize a minimum of one meetup per month. I facilitate two Scrum with Legos session: one at Puebla and another at Mexico City. I am happy that we do not have trouble to find facilitators for each meetup. In the first semester we have the honor to have this facilitators: Martín Salías, Fernando Pérez, Víctor García, Iván Jiménez, Yamit Cárdenas, Maica Trinidad and Héctor Arroyo. The topics were variated: from retrospectives, agile architecture, design thinking to graphic facilitation.
On May, we organize an Agile Open Space and around 120 people came that Saturday. We plan this event to be totally free and all day long. All the talks were given by people of our community and Mike Beedle gave us the closing keynote about user centric products and innovation.
Also in May, I went to Cartagena de Indias, Colombia to the Scrum Coach Retreat Latin America (SCRLA 2016). And I co-invented a Learning Framework. This was my first out of Mexico experience and it was so powerful. I lived the learning, frustrations and excitement of creation. All these coaches are very close to my agile heart. Whenever I see that picture I smile.
The second semester was very intense for me because I traveled a lot and met great agilists. It started at Jalisco Campus Party when I participated at a panel called “More Woman Developing Technology”. Then I had the opportunity to go to Barcelona and share with the Agile Community about Organizational Change. I found a very mature and glowing community; it was a pleasure to share with them. Then a big event: the Ágiles 2016 at Quito, Ecuador. My conference about Learning 3.0 was selected on the program. All the experience was fulfilling for me; I felt revitalized and with a lot of ideas to do. By the end of the year I returned to Guadalajara, this time to the PMI congress. The year ended with a superfun Pecha-Kucha where I talked about what are the most difficult things to hear or say about Agile.
The second part of the year was the moment where the consolidation of the community began. Each month, more and more familiar faces were shown. I participated with a workshop about User Story Slicing and a talk at Guadalajara about the Agile Mindset. I’m so happy that the community there is beginning. On August a mini-Open Space with self-organized catering was organized. This was so much fun because it was at Chapultepec, a big park of Mexico City. There, we had the opportunity and the challenge to interact with the nature. On this semester, we have visitors from Colombia, Spain and Ecuador: Jorge Abad, Luis Mulato and Claudia Sandoval, José Sandoval y Unai Roldán. Andrés Valdez talked in my place when I got sick and my voice went out. The last talk was born within a community member: Gustavo Arellano. A variated topics were presented: UX, personal experiences, self-organized teams, Agile organizations and more.
Thanks to facilitators for your knowledge sharing! And of course to all community who participate at every event. Each month I learn more and more.
This year at Segundamano.mx, all Prod&Dev teams worked really hard to improve our platform, not only to be friendlier to the user, but also to be technically better. This allow us to have parts of our platform in Continuous Delivery. Now, from having 2 releases per month we deliver as much we can. The top has been 48 production releases by week. I won’t lie, it was really really hard work with a dosis of stress. But we learned and grew. I am so proud of this team. So I organized a retrospective for them to know how chingones they are. On September I flew to Barcelona to the Reboot congress. This was a Schibsted’s event. I had the opportunity to share experiences, eat jamón, drink sangrías, sing and dance with a lot of cousins from around the world. I met some more Agile Coaches (mostly from Spain) and worked with them on planning a Product Owner Community. On the last three months, I said good bye to two great persons that I admire and with whom I worked very close this year: my boss & CTO, Sergio Visinoni an the Head of PO, David Gill. They had our last dosis of our mexican craziness at their good bye party. I organized a breakfast using speed dating combined with personal maps to welcome and get know better tour new CTO Mohamed Hassan & COO Ariel Cilento.
Mexico City is a enormous and sometimes not a nice city. When we moved here, I had some doubts: about my job (are they really that great? –yes we are), about the pollution and my health (sometimes I suffer from respiratory / allergic issues), about our personal security. But now, after I writed all this, I feel great, proud to be part of this two families. I am grateful to all of them who helped me to realize my dreams and motivate me to dream bigger.
2017 will start with the biggest challenge I had had in my whole live. Be Segundamano’s Enterprise Coach. I am no longer part of Prod&Tech team. Now, my team is Happiness and we work with all the company. I am a little scared and I miss very very much my techies. So, I organized a team canvas to know better my new team and start understanding what the hell I am going to do.
I am starting to have some ideas of what to do on my new rol and the impact that could have at Segundamano and our society. But one thing is for sure: I am part of a great team that is part of a big family. They care about me and give me freedom to experiment, learn and keep growing on what passionate me. I am thrilled for this 2017.
PS. I am leaving wordpress and Spanish on my posts. This is part of the challenges I put to myself in 2017. Please feel free to tell me if you don’t understand or if I have bad writing or spelling ;)
