(T-K) Agile Coach

About Agile Delivery at ExpressVPN

We’ve been developing software using agile principles ever since our founding in 2009. Despite plenty of years of experience, there is still lots of room for improvement. If you look at metrics in predictability, cycle times, WIP-counts, experiment success-rates, OKR achievement rates, etc. depending on the team you observe, you’ll notice high volatility, and sometimes even the metrics not being available or not used to make decisions.

You might even notice the occasional lingering waterfall mental debt, such as testing still being treated too much like something that happens after development. Despite all of this imperfection, we’ve managed to build a successful business. We’re very keen to improve though.

A few highlights to describe the current maturity of our delivery:

• Some of our teams use Scrum and some use Kanban
• The vast majority of developers were hired with an existing mentality of automating all tests. Everyone understands the value of automated testing.
• Most teams’ actual vs predicted delivery dates are off a by factor of 2.
• Some teams struggle with unclear definitions of done.
• Some teams struggle with stories being too large, or acceptance and success criteria being unclear.
• All components have CI and CD pipelines (and have done so for many years). However, some of them have long running-times (even 4 hours), and some have reliability problems.
• All projects use Jira. We’ve built our own tooling to calculate various cycle-time metrics based on data in Jira and visualize them in Tableau. However, too few teams use them regularly to make decisions and track their progress in reducing cycle time.
• Some components have an unnecessary reliance on either manually executed regression tests, or on slow-running end-to-end automated tests.
• Exploratory testing comes quite late in the cycle, and isn’t as effective as we’d like. We rely too much on dogfooding and beta testing to find new bugs. Test-planning is often superficial.

That’s where you come in. You will join our newly built team of Agile Coaches to help many more teams (and not just software development teams, but also functions like Marketing, Recruiting, HR, and Finance) to deliver business values more efficiently with agile values, principles and practices. You have full support from co-founders to make it happen.

Responsibilities

• Rotating through embedding themselves in delivery teams across the company. Help teams to understand their issues, guide them to apply agile practices and implement improvement changes. Help them to be self-sufficient. Areas of focus includes but not limited to

• Product Backlog management: Prioritize backlog items with clear expected business outcomes.
• Flow Management: Track cycle time, reduce cycle time through right sizing of works and diagnose bottlenecks
• Estimation: Improve the predictability of delivery
• Delivery Risk Management: Continuously identify, track, mitigate risks and timely escalation.
• Continuous Improvement: Come up with actionable improvement items from retrospective. Track progress and results

• Training: identify skill development needs and knowledge gaps. Help all team members address them. Create learning paths, create and deliver training.
• Facilitate agile meetings as needed, including cross teams planning and retrospective meetings.
• Define and keep refining a model process so that teams can choose to adapt. Coach teams who have special needs in defining their own customized processes.

Your success will be evaluated by:

• Better delivery
• Creating higher business values
• Continuous Improvement actions taken
• Satisfaction of internal customers
• Alignment on process across teams

Required Skills

• You have a deep understanding of software development processes using agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban. Not just about understanding what it is but also understanding how it works and why it works. That likely came from being in roles such as Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Developer, or Designer.
• You have at least eight years of experience in working with some form of agile practices, two of which in some kind of coaching capacity.
• You have a proven track record of helping reduce cycle time of software teams. You track metrics such as WIP-counts, and cycle-time, and use them to find insights that let teams deliver value faster.
• You have experience in delivery Agile training
• You have a deep enough understanding of technology such that you’ll be able to judge the clarity of a story and its acceptance and success criteria and sometimes make suggestions for breaking it into more manageable pieces.
• You have a keen ability to influence without authority.
• You have excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Nice skills to have, but not required (if any)

• Professional Coaching experience or certification.