My Story
An 80’s kid growing up in communist Bulgaria, I had the immense opportunity to have access to the now legendary “Pravetz” Apple IIe clone with its BASIC interpreter, machine code, Logo and even Pascal. Throughout my child and teen years, I explored my fascination with computers and technology — programming, music sequencing, 2D and 3D graphics, operating systems, networking, and the early World Wide Web.
In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, my Industrial Engineering Master’s introduced me to the concepts of Lean Manufacturing, the Toyota Production System, and Systems Theory, as well as a slew of mathematical theory from calculus to statistics, control theory, and queueing theory that (sort of) made sense of it all. What really intrigued me though was the human aspect of Lean Manufacturing, particularly how vital culture was to its success. That fascination with the human aspect of technology has been underpinning my professional interests and development ever since.
I was lucky enough to land a job while still college, a Project Manager overseeing the development of the image archival software for the Gotthard-Basistunnel project. I was even luckier to have an incredibly customer-focused product sponsor, and a small, tightly knit, and self-sufficient team. We naturally went into a model of iterating on the product in small increments – weekly, as was the case – planning on Monday, syncing daily, and releasing every Friday after a short demo. At the time I didn’t know it had a name, but looking back, these were my first steps in agile software development.
It wasn’t until a few years later, in 2007, that I was finally exposed to Scrum. It struck me as a very natural way of developing software and couldn’t really figure out why developers were complaining about it. Two years later I took over a project that opened my eyes to just how poorly understood, implemented, and abused agile software development can be with the wrong mindset. It was then that I made it my mission that, to the best of my abilities, I would not allow that to happen on my watch ever again.
Some years later and with several successful agile transformation programs under my belt, I had the immense opportunity to enroll in the Coaching Agile Teams class with Lyssa Adkins herself. She was kind enough to sign my copy of her book, and what she wrote then has been driving my passion for Agile Coaching to this day.
