With a couple of years of entry level experience under my belt, I began my journey as a band 7 software developer for IBM. Band 7 is akin to an intermediate level. This role requires ownership of component level software, organizational eminence through cross-team collaboration, and evidence of teaching and mentoring more junior team members. As I have moved into this position I have continued to grow my role on my team and in collaborative strike teams.
As our team composition changed and we lost more senior members, I stepped further into a leadership role by taking on Product Owner responsibilities for the team. I began working more closely with Architecture and Product Management to refine product requirements, create design documents, prioritize issues, and plan release scopes. I have continued to fill my role as a QA and Automation specialist and I have passed along my Scrum Master duties to another team member. As much as I love scrum mastering, this has been beneficial to myself by freeing up more time to focus on product ownership, and has provided me the opportunity to provide some direct mentorship in the area I’m most passionate about.
I continue to be an active member of agile initiatives across teams. I took over running a scrum master round table when layoffs saw our organization lose our agile coach. This was a monthly meeting for scrum masters to come together and do continuous learning about anything agile. I would facilitate choosing a topic and provide a video or article which covered the chosen topic. In the meeting we would focus on sharing our takeaways from the material, and create action items for how we would each apply the learnings to our team’s.
In my own team I also saw myself taking on more technical leadership as our team started working on new projects in the SaaS space. I had to learn and expand a wide variety of skills ranging from API design, Kubernetes deployments, microservices architecture, kafka messaging, and Golang. The rest of the team was on the same journey and we had to work collaboratively to learn new tech stacks and validate our planned work through low fidelity proof of concepts. This was a good opportunity to use my leadership skills in times of uncertainty. I had to lead by example where I was able to, for example I was confident in my API design skills to be able to produce solid specs that could be implemented to fit the spec. On the other hand, I was not very confident in my Golang skills and had to rely on other team members with more aptitude and experience with those tools to lead design on those components.
Throughout my time as a band 7 I have also had the chance to grow my soft skills, especially when it comes to customer interactions, and internal politics. I have had to take on the role as backup L3 support for my product working on customer escalations for critical issues that L2 support can not resolve. This has given me very good root cause analysis skills, and the communication tools to be able to explain those issues to frustrated customers. On the other side of the customer interaction spectrum, I am also regularly asked by customer success managers, sales executives, and product management to take part in roadmap discussions with customers to make sure our long term product goals are aligned with their needs.
In the middle of those experiences sits the political balance board that is the Product Owner role. I have gained a deep appreciation for the pressures that a product owner experiences on a day to day basis. Needing to find a balance between maintenance work, feature work, and operational improvements requires strong prioritization, communication, and adaptability. I have found that I have needed to adopt more pragmatic solutions to problems that my agile training might teach me are not ideal, but the organizational factors around me require compromise. Sometimes you need to say no to one thing to deliver value in another area, and sometimes you need to go along to get along and say yes to something you don’t fully agree with to buy good will.
Even with an expanding scope of roles, I still find the most rewarding feedback that I get is related to my own team’s collaboration and team building. Throughout the years I have got to experience working with many different personality types and skill levels and the one piece of feedback that is constant on my team is our comfort in working together as a team and supporting each other when times are tough. In the complex world of software development, there is always going to be something that the team needs to solve to provide value. Ny team is always comfortable facing that uncertainty and figuring out the right solution to deliver and I’m very proud of that.