Leaving prowareness to become the Scrum Police

After three and a half years I'm moving on to a new challenge. Below the mail I just sent out to colleagues, with a (not so short) list of things I'm grateful for, that I've been a part of in Prowareness.

Note: I realize the below mail is neglecting the customers who also played a big part in all of the things you read below. Big thanks to ALL the customers and students I've had the pleasure to work with. Without you all none of the below would be possible!

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Hi!

Today is my last day at Prowareness. This day marks 3,5 years of hard work, fun, sometimes frustration and most of all LEARNING. I am very grateful for all the people I got to learn with, collaborate with and hopefully contributed to the mission of improving peoples’ impact .

 Below an attempt to highlight (in no particular order) a few things that come to mind and that have been made possible or took place because I was part of the Prowareness family. Please feel free to forward/share if I forgot to sent it to someone who might find value in reading this…

•  The Product Owner Perspective (Podcast) – I had immense joy and also had to step over my bad English and ‘ehhhh’s in this learning journey together with Matthijs and the other people involved. Although I have only made 10 episodes and am still deliberating how/when to pick this one up again, the interviews still hold value for people and you can watch/listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7EyEXQIX0&list=PLp8-sNr1WXp4qsXlFdsKfdZanL0Pq4Rj9 or https://sjoerdly.com/series/product-owner-perspective/
• Becoming a PST – If you are passionate about Scrum and love to nudge people in the right direction in training settings, then this is a no-brainer. I am very grateful for the opportunity to become a PST during my time at Prowareness and hopefully having played a small part in bringing Prowareness and Scrum.org communities closer together again. I will be back at Prowareness in January for a scrum.org F2F so see ya there! Special mention also for team Academy, Office Management and Marketing in all the things they did to make the training go well and collaborating on improving them.
• Struggling with… and FINDING colleagues passionate about Product Management – This was a big struggle. After having found Robbin in this focus/passion, then him joining another company, I was contemplating following there. I am however very glad to subsequently finding others within Prowareness (you know who you are!) that are passionate about Product Management as well. The Product Lanes are a positive (albeit small) step in the right direction and I sincerely hope they provide the trust to invest even more in Innovation and proper Product Management of our own offerings. Taking our own advice and using the brain power we have for our own organizations benefit!
• Being part of the PSPO-A development and the launch of this course for Prowareness – This year I had the extreme privilege to be part of the development team that initiated the PSPO-A course development. Together with a set of international colleagues (including current stewards Robbin Schuurman & Chris Lukassen) we brainstormed on the topics, themes and possible exercises. In later development stages Robbin and Chris did the hard work of making a coherent training of it, and my focus shifted of making sure Prowareness played a part in the dutch launch. Hosting the FIRST beta this summer in delft, hosting another to be prepared for the launch in Prowareness recently, AND together with Rob van Lanen the FIRST inhouse customer training at Rabobank (thanks Roy for this opportunity!). And then seeing how Marketing, Academy, Rob & Emiel took care of a solid launch plan and the FIRST international training of the Public PSPO-A release. So awesome!
• Having developed two Product Owner courses – I also look back on having created and transferred two Product Owner focused trainings: Stakeholder Management, largely together with Ernst Bosch) and Advanced Product Backlog Management (mostly by myself but fed by input from a lot of other brains among who Martin van Soest, Robbin Schuurman and others). Both 1 day courses where I learned a lot about training, adjusting the program on the fly and how hard it is to decide what is most important to teach for a certain topic.
• Being part of PO-Expert programmes – Another thing to be grateful for, collaborating with colleagues on Expert Programmes relating to Product Management and Product Ownership. This culminated in setting up and selling a Product Owner Expert Programme for Bol.com together with Rick Milder, which is now put in to practice by Martin, Ernst & Ilse. Aside from that I had immense learning and fun by stepping in at programmes at various clients together with Guus Verweij and Marten Meij among others. I also learned a lot facilitating workshops at KPN thanks to Edwin & Emiel.
• Organizing Scrum Day Europe – Together with the passionate people of Marketing (you KNOW who you are and what you did) we worked hard to create a nice community conference, with valuable workshops (selected by me and 2 non-PW PST’s) in a fun and positive environment and organization (mostly team Marketing’s effort!). I believe we did great for a ‘virgin’ team (none of those involved had organized this event before). PS if you have questions about the lessons learned for the next event, feel free to ask me! Note: Big up to co-selectors Jasper Alblas & Pawel Mysliwiec for all the good collaborations on the programme!
• Having fun and collaborating with collegues – Since being hired by Denny de Waard, there were many team-events and many teams I’ve been a part of. One thing sticks out over all those different events, teams and people involved: The genuine will to help eachother grow (what we’ve come to call ‘bruine broeken momenten’). Also the drive to grow and learn (at least those colleagues who lasted longer than a few months) and make an impact. My journey started with team Mad Men (Guido, Bas & Wilbert) and ended in team MoveOn (too many to mention, I’m a lazy BASStard, but love you all). And I hold love for all teams I’ve been involved in. This is also a positive idea to look forward, as Region Midden is going through a team reshuffle today. Any team composition will be adding value. I'm sure!
• Being part of a responsive organization – Although it is easy to look at what could be better (believe me, a lot, and I’m happy to chat about that too) it is also nice to appreciate what we do well. Since joing 3,5 yrs ago, the organization structure changed many times and we experimented a lot! Even though these experiments lack proper evaluations for the most part, we do take a collaborative approach to change, learn from mistakes (for instance when a change is perceived too top-down) and this is something I hope Prowareness keeps up in the future! (but please though, be a tiny bit more empirical about it or at least make it more visible)

I believe I could go on with more, but the time box is running out. I’m sure I forgot stuff. There was just so much good!

For those curious where I’ll be trying to make an impact from now on, here’s my future perspective…

I will join the Dutch Police (Eenheid Midden Nederland) as an Agile Coach/Scrum Master for the Cybercrime Team (detection, apprehension, prevention). I will be stationed in the City Center of Utrecht so if you fancy a cup of coffee (we’ll go to a good coffee place nearby, no worries), grab lunch or drinks and chat about all things agile… Let me know!

Find, connect and interact with me here on Linkedin or... https://twitter.com/sjoerdly https://sjoerdly.com

I wish you all the best!

Cheers,

Sjoerd