Assumptions invalid? Pivot!

Adapting when some paths are blocked and others are not

About 10 months ago, I was just barely hanging on to my job.

I was working as a Scrum Master for a consulting agency, but because of a downturn in the market they couldn’t find a Scrum Master placement for me, so I was just sucking up payroll without bringing any money in for them.

The writing was on the wall that if something didn’t give, they were going to try to cut my loose. My manager even told me that if no assignment came up for me by a certain date, that’s exactly what would happen.

That date arrived, and I just kept my head down. I didn’t contact my manager and hoped he forgot about me. But after about a week of skating by unnoticed, he called me.

However, he wasn’t calling to give me the axe right away. First, he had a need for someone to fill a Product Owner job, and he wanted me to interview for it.

I’d only been a Scrum Master for a couple of years, and I did not feel like I was prepared for a Product Owner position, but I knew I was obligated to take the interview. So I did it, and shortly thereafter they offered me the position.

I didn’t want to take it, because I was trying to hold out for a Scrum Master position, where I knew what I was doing and could actually be helpful to a team. I was not looking forward to crashing and burning in this position I felt unprepared for.

But paired with the aforementioned danger of just being fired, this offer seemed impossible to refuse. So I accepted it, and got started in my first role as a PO.

And the first two months of my job as a PO were, to put it as nicely as I can, terrible. I was in over my head, with seemingly no support, and I felt like I was drowning. My stress level was through the roof and I wanted to quit everyday.

I was struggling to communicate with my team and my operational manager because it was my first French language job, and my French was NOT good.

My team got the work done in spite of me, and in both French and English, I told my manager that I did not think I was the right person for this job.

Thank goodness the client team was English-speaking, so at least I could communicate without sounding like a buffoon, and understand what they said back in those meetings. But they weren’t less stressful, because even in English I didn’t understand any of the terminology they were using or what they expected of me.

It was, in short, the nightmare job. The kind you give someone when you want them to either quit, or fail so you can fire them. My trial period was ending just a week after our project would either be renewed or not, so it felt like it lined up just perfectly for them to let me go right before it became harder to do.

I was toughing it out until I got fired so that I would qualify for the unemployment payments. No way they were going to make me quit.

Then something weird happened.

After I struggled through a few renewal meetings with the client, giving them a presentation about additional work we could do beyond the original two-month scope… they renewed.

They didn’t just renew, they gave us funding to double the size of the team and greatly increase our scope. And one member of the client team told me he thought I was the right person for the job.

It was a bittersweet victory for me. I wasn’t going to lose my job, but now I’d been locked into this position that I had hated since I’d taken it. I didn’t know how to feel.

I took a weekend to decide what I wanted to do. I could still quit.

In the time I had been working as a Product Owner on this assignment, I tried to learn some things about being a PO. Basics like how to prioritize and how to communicate with the team. Product Strategy versus Product Goals versus Sprint Goals.

How to validate or invalidate assumptions, and when to pivot.

I didn’t understand that last one terribly well yet, but it was clear to me that this was where I was. I needed to examine my assumptions and decide whether it was better to hold to my existing plan, or to pivot.

My plan was to work as a Scrum Master on an English-speaking team. To capitalize on my previous position as a developer-turned-Scrum Master and to spend a few years improving my craft and my French before maybe one day trying to become an Agile Coach.

My assumptions were

• since I got hired as a Scrum Master, I would be given a Scrum Master role on a team.

• I would get to work on an English-speaking team.

• I was not qualified to work as a Product Owner.

Yeah, it was pretty easy to invalidate those assumptions. To be sure about the last one, I took the PSPO and only missed one answer.

Maybe I could do this job. I decided to pivot.

I stopped telling people I was a Scrum Master filling a PO role, and started saying I was a Product Owner.

I added some English speaking developers so that I’d be better supported in communicating with my team.

And while it hasn’t been perfectly smooth sailing ever since that moment, the pivot worked.

I have a great relationship with my team. We leaned hard into agility and our team is now the most adaptive and productive I’ve ever worked with.

Our client satisfaction scores zipped up to “Exceeds Expectations” in every category after another month, and they’ve stayed there ever since. Our contract has been extended 3 times now and is worth more than 20 times the original amount.

Having the confidence of my client made me feel empowered to have opinions and make decisions I felt shaky about before. Recently the client was looking to fill a similar role for another team, and he came to my manager not to ask for another Product Owner, but “another Jeremy.”

I know, this sounds like I’m just doing a lot of bragging… but the point here is that I feel like I’m doing good work, and now I’m really happy in this role, even though it was not in my original plans.

Deciding to pivot, rather than being forced down an undesirable path, put me back in control of my career, my happiness, and my destiny.

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Hi! I know it’s been a while since we’ve talked. I hope you don’t mind just getting this newsletter again without any advance notice.

I’m writing on LinkedIn again too, so if you’re not already following me there, you can find me at https://linkedin.com/in/scrumify.