Rachel Feres describes transitioning from a career in education to software and learning the language and practices of Agile. She found an online course engaging, well-chunked, and humorous, which helped her understand concrete concepts (e.g., story points, sprints, product ownership). She reports being able to apply these ideas at work and personally—especially Kanban-style work-in-progress limits—which led to practical changes in how she and her household prioritize tasks.
So I recently transitioned careers from education to software. And there's a whole new language to learn in this new industry, and certainly Agile is part of that language. Everyone talks about working in Sprints. This whole idea of product ownership was new to me and things like that. And so I really wanted to get a handle on the language that I was hearing around me. First. I'm going to just say it. A lot of online learning is really boring and it's hard to stick with. And I found that the course was enjoyable, engaging. It was chunked out in just the right segments to get a little bit of learning in digestible bits. And I appreciated the sense of humor. A really simple example is I've read about story points, like four times and I still was not really getting it until I went through that segment. And then I was like, oh, this makes perfect sense. And so I felt like I came away with not just theoretical knowledge, but the ability to put it into practice. I mean, certainly there has been a real benefit to my work life, but I think also one to my personal life. So this idea of work in progress limits is something that really resonates looking at some of the stuff around Kanban, for example, like, something comes on, something else has to come off. And I think that's a very freeing concept. So that certainly has had a pretty profound impact. I was even talking with my husband about it the other day. It was like, we have too much, too many things in progress right now. We have to make a real thoughtful decision about what comes off. And I think that's something that I didn't think about before. So I knew I needed to learn more. But I also, I guess, discovered beyond just learning some new terminology, a whole framework for working that really resonated with who I am as a person and a professional, and I just really enjoyed learning about it.
