Day in the Life: Hiring Our Heroes Fellowship

Meet Ioannis Wallingford, a Scrum Master Fellow at Kin + Carta, based in Chicago, Illinois.

After six years as an Engineer Captain in the Army, I joined Kin + Carta as part of the Hiring Our Heroes Fellowship. This program allows for transitioning veterans to gain insightful career knowledge with a host company before taking off the uniform and joining the private sector.

I chose to work at Kin + Carta because I could see myself working with the people I met at the company. From the conversations with my recruiter to my interviews, it was a unique blend of working on prominent technical problems, combined with the personable working culture.

One of the first things that stood out to me was leadership structure. In the Army, units take on a projectized organizational structure, where leadership roles are clearly defined and given high levels of authority. Due to the nature of the work, this allows for adherence to waterfall project management techniques. At Kin + Carta, the software development environment drives the organization towards agile methodologies. Instead of a project manager taking full control with inputs from team members, the Scrum Master serves as an enabler to facilitate the team members to make decisions. Naturally, both organizational structures are best suited for different types of problems.

Despite differences, the lessons learned from the Army’s leadership principles (or as we called them “principles of mission command”) remain applicable, even if they manifest themselves in different ways. These principles being:

1. Build cohesive teams through mutual trust
2. Create a shared understanding
3. Provide a clear commander’s intent
4. Exercise disciplined initiative
5. Use mission orders
6. Accept prudent risk

My personal favorite is “provide a clear commander’s intent” because it gives your team both left and right limits, along with an intended end-state. This provides your team members, who possess the most information about a situation, the guidance to push through problems in the absence of fine details. At Kin + Carta, we exemplify this principle through user stories. The product owner provides just enough detail to accomplish a task and the software developers decide how to do it.

Lastly, “Pockets, Pockets Pockets”. This may sound silly, but an abrupt change I encountered was when I took my notebook and tried to slide it into a pocket that was no longer there. No shoulder pockets to store a notebook. No pen pockets to store your pen. No cargo pockets to store your gloves. No lower leg pockets to store miscellaneous items. It looks like the Army got something right! Perhaps Kin + Carta needs to look into business casual fishing jackets?

You can learn more about the Hiring Our Heroes fellowship program through their website here.