Agile2018

Abstract:
Our scale-up Journey was a roller-coaster ride, Scrum to Waterfall to Agile
I have been a Scrum Master for three years at food-tech startup in South Korea, one of the most competitive markets in the world. Since then, the company has grown explosively through mergers and acquisitions. Our tech organization faced drastic changes in the way of working and culture. I hope you will taste the real-world practices when a startup scaled up and see how our tech organization has evolved at each stage of the progress.
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Lessons Learned from Your Experience:

• Working at a startup means that you will always face challenges. So, it is highly essential to adapt to the rapidly changing environment and have a growth mindset.
• Increasing employee engagement is the key to organization health at every level. A retrospective is a powerful tool for boosting communication and cultivating a culture in the organization.
• To integrate two cultures after a merger, it is strongly recommended that you set the cultural integration strategies and define what culture you’re trying to build at the very beginning. Otherwise, it might be too late.
• A top-down direction of the need for change is not sufficient. It is required that you promote bottom-up involvement continuously to make progress in organizational transformation.
• Last not but least, a scrum master role and responsibility at a startup can be transformed into a Project Leader or developed to an Agile Coach according to organizational growth and continually changing environment. Sometimes, this might be confusing when it comes to making other people understand clearly about your role. From my experience, I would like to suggest that being open-minded and trying to define and shaping your core capabilities rather than sticking with titles are the valuable takeaways when working at a startup.

Attachments:

• Agile 2018_Scaling at Food-tech Startup_Nari Kim_20180809.pdf