Oh, that’s what that was

At the beginning of the week, I thought a “scrum” was a morning meeting where your team spoke with clients and the development team to check in on progress.

This past summer I worked for design firm in San Francisco and in all honesty, I heard a lot of words and phrases that I didn’t understand. Quite frankly, I was surprised. I mean, I go to a top notch design school and learn from cutting edge industry people and yet, there I was, working at a design firm that spoke a foreign language.

“We will have our stand up in 15 minutes.”

Ummm, ok, is that like improv?

“Do you have any blockers?”

Like, as in beta? Ummm, no, I don’t.

“Oh, yeah, we are going to do that in this week’s sprint .”

Wtf? I don’t run people.

It was actually a little like being in a different country. After awhile, I got the hang of things, but I was never really sure what was going on.

We would do a daily “standup” meeting, in which we went around in a circle saying what we were working on and if we had anything blocking us from getting moving forward in the project. Standup and blockers — check. It seemed like weekly sprints were kinda like a to do list for the development team. Scrum meetings were done in the morning and seemed to be a vehicle to update everyone on the project. So, I was able to adapt and figure out the gist of what was going on, but I never really understood the big picture.

After reading about Agile this week, I get it. They were creating an agile environment, or at least trying to.

I went through the entire summer not really understanding the big picture. I didn’t ask what all of the crazy words meant because it felt like I should have known the language already. Now I find my self wondering if I would have had a better experience or been a better team member if would have taken the time to really understand.

In today’s world, information is at our finger tips. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to be in school. I am learning so much. But, I now realize that I’m not going to learn everything there is to know about this industry in class. And, that is ok. A lot of this is going to be up to me to learn through experience and research. In the future, when I don’t know, I will just ask, look it up, or bug @cwodtke.

November 7, 2015