Here at Miro, we are working on a visual platform for innovation that empowers ourselves and other team-driven companies to create outstanding products and experiences. This tool helps Fortune 500 to embrace remote collaboration and be ready for the future. We are always interested in the ways leading organizations are dealing with these issues, and we hope to gather the best insights for our customers. That’s why we are excited to announce our first meetup in San Francisco dedicated to challenges of building a product in a distributed team. We are also proud to share the interview with one of our speakers, Eventbrite’s Agile coach Pete Lim.
What is your background? How did it bring you to the current point of your career?
Before I was an Agile Coach, I was a Program Manager and a Scrum Master. Before that, I was an in client services and project management. Becoming an Agile coach was an evolution that happened when moving from professional services work to product development and discovering that there was a role and a community better suited for the way I have always preferred to work.
Can you, please, describe your role at the company?
Our company is split into different segments, each with their own focus, goals and roadmaps. Each of the segments is also given some measure of autonomy to organize and create process around their work.
As an Agile Coach, my primary function is to support the parts of the organization that have chosen to work or learn to work in an Agile way through coaching, educating, facilitation and mentoring. More generally, I help individuals and teams establish a collaborative, healthy and sustainable working environment. In some cases, that means the adoption of Scrum. In some cases it has meant creating space for teams to form and create other agreements for how they will work together.
What’s your “secret sauce” for delivering innovative products and services?
My answer is probably no surprise given I am an Agile coach. I stress the importance of building and supporting collaborative and self organizing teams, releasing iteratively, getting feedback from your customers and responding to change.
Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition
Building & Scaling Products with Distributed Teams
What advice can you give to aspiring Agile coaches?
As coaches, we must be lightning rods for change. Change is hard and change takes time. People resist change. Be resilient, be vigilant, be patient and be kind. In my experience, those values support change in a way that allows it to happen while preserving your sanity and the sanity of those you hope to change.
Your top 3 tools for remote collaboration?
We use Google Hangouts to replicate in person, face-to-face interaction, which I believe is the best way to communicate. When in-person is impossible, video chat is second best. We use Miro most often for story mapping but also to replicate other collaboration exercises we would normally do in-person with a whiteboard and post-its (such as effort vs. complexity graphs). We use Retrium for virtual Sprint retrospectives.
About Pete Lim
Pete Lim is an Agile coach at Eventbrite. Previously, he worked for Ticketfly, Livefyre, and thisMoment. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
