Hiring Agile Coaches
Halló heimur! (Hello World in Icelandic)
I hope all your summers (or winters, depending on your latitude) are off to a good start! For those who have mid-year review processes, don’t forget the previous newsletters that talk about it: Writing better performance reviews: assembling the data, Writing Useful Performance Reviews: Evaluating the data and writing the review, Writing Useful Performance Reviews: Making A Raise Recommendation, Delivering Performance Reviews. I’m looking forward to my summer vacation and getting to work more from my patio.
About this newsletter
If you are new to this newsletter, here’s what makes it unique. Every two weeks, I share a chapter from my book It Depends: Writing on Technology Leadership 2012-2022, which Unit Circle Press released in March. These chapters are not in sequential order, but each one is a standalone piece. In addition, there’s a podcast that serializes the audiobook in order, released in the alternate weeks from this newsletter.
The Latest Podcast
The latest episode of the podcast is “Every Decision Creates a Policy,” and I think it is a must-listen for any manager, but definitely for those of you who are at earlier-stage companies that don’t have a ton of defined policies. I have seen managers make the mistake of not thinking about the consequences of a decision over and over and then have to do damage control to repair the morale implications of that decision. You can get the episode at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, directly via the RSS Feed, or wherever you get your podcasts (see pod.link for a more extensive list).
Drop me a line
I’m always eager to hear from you. If you have questions, want a signed copy, or simply want to say ‘hi!’, please email me at contact@itdependsbook.net. You can also share your thoughts on Substack or the various podcast platforms. Your feedback is invaluable, and I look forward to hearing from you.
About this week’s chapter
This week’s chapter is “Hiring Agile Coaches,” which may be one of the book’s most (unintentionally) provocative chapters. Agile has faced a backlash over the last few years, and with companies trimming their workforces, the agile roles (agile coach, scrum master, etc.) are often cut first because they are not seen as contributing directly to getting the work done.
I am a massive fan of agile thinking and development processes. I am old enough to have started as a developer before agile existed, when there was only waterfall software development (and variations thereof). When I left Microsoft to join my first startup, the Extreme Programming book by Kent Beck had just come out, and our architect convinced me that we should try it out. After many years of the spec/build/test/ship cycle at Microsoft and other places, it was a revelation. I have worked agile ever since. While I understand that many folks do not appreciate agile or don’t think it works very well, when I’ve talked to them they’ve usually been subjected to a poor agile implementation or top-down transformation that followed the rules of Agile, but not the intent. While that may sound like making excuses, I’ve seen agile be an incredible way to organize work at the team and company level, and for that reason I will continue to work that way until we find a better alternative. There doesn’t seem to be an alternative that the folks who dislike agile want to adopt. They just don’t want to do “agile.” That said, many of the ideas and techniques from agile have become so common that many companies are using them without even thinking they are using Agile. Pair programming, daily standups, and sprints are all things companies do without thinking they are doing agile. So maybe agile will live on even if Agile does not.
In the chapter, I talk briefly about how I discovered the agile coach role at Spotify and eventually understood its value. I still think it is valuable. When I joined my current company, we already had agile coaches, which is excellent. I would have hired them if we hadn’t. This chapter describes my experience hiring agile coaches after returning to the US and some things I learned about hiring an agile coach in a country where the role isn’t as well understood.
This is chapter 24 from It Depends.
Hiring Agile Coaches
Originally published on June 22, 2020
This tweet from Dave Nicolette inspired me to discuss what I look for when hiring Agile professionals.
Figure 22 - Dave Nicolette Tweet
Understanding the value of agile coaches
While I have been working exclusively with Agile techniques since we adopted Extreme Programming at a start-up where I was the development lead in 2000, I had never encountered a team-aligned full-time Agile professional before I joined Spotify in 2013. My prior experience with Agile was always that the team was responsible for it.
As a development lead, I was the XP coach when we adopted Extreme Programming. When my teams chose Scrum, I might take the role of Scrum Master, or it was the Program Manager, someone else on the team, or float between multiple people.
When I came to Spotify and found that I had three Agile coaches in my tribe, I was first a bit skeptical about the role. The coaches I worked with were not program managers, not scrum masters. They didn’t “lead” Agile in the teams with whom they worked. I wasn’t sure what their purpose was.
I first understood their value when one of them went on an extended vacation a few months after I started. At Spotify, I found the most advanced and mature implementation of Agile/Lean product development at a scale I had ever seen. I knew the coaches helped with this, but I wasn’t sure how.
The coach went on their vacation, and everything kept going on as usual for a while. I would visit the standups, and teams added stories and tracked them across the boards. One day I sat in on a squad’s standup and noticed they had added a couple of swim lanes to their Kanban board. They now had more swim lanes than developers—a big red flag.
Over the weeks the coach was gone, the teams slowly slid into bad habits. Velocity started to slip. I did my best to make them aware of this and get them back onto better paths, but I couldn’t be with each team enough.
The coach returned from vacation, and within a week or so, things were back to their high levels of performance. I wanted to see how he did it, so I watched the ceremonies when I could. He didn’t cajole or quote Agile texts at them. He gently reminded them what good looked like, lessons they had learned in the past. He asked them questions about their approach. He didn’t “fix” them. He got them to fix themselves—a true coach.
Now I understood the value of the Agile coach role.
Good coach, bad coach
As Spotify grew and the number of Agile coaches in the company swelled, I also saw some challenges with the role. Some coaches were highly effective, and some less so. I was lucky to start with three excellent coaches on my team. Some of my peers struggled with the coaches in their organizations.
As I came to understand the characteristics of the coaches that I found successful, I started to look for those qualities as we hired into our team. I have continued to look for those qualities as I have created those roles at companies in the US and UK where the role of Agile Coach (versus Scrum Master, Delivery Manager, or Agile Project Manager) is still novel.
Before I enumerate those characteristics, I want to make one point about careers as an Agile professional.
It is a tough job.
In many parts of the world, full-time Agile roles are very hard to come by. Mostly, companies hire Agile folks on a contractual basis. So, most Agile people must string together six- or twelve-month stints at various companies to earn a living.
After reviewing hundreds of US and European resumes, the same companies show up often. These companies are always the ones who are in year X of a one-year Agile transformation program. Those are soul-crushing gigs.
The stringing together of short-term jobs can lead to a consultant mindset. These folks have the wisdom from jumping into hostile environments, trying to survive. They have seen many mistakes that companies have made. Few have held the more extended roles where they have not only got teams functioning in an Agile way but also helped them evolve to a much better level. Their experience is broad but not deep.
It is vital to keep that in mind as you review applicants. You must understand their world and watch out for folks stuck in that short-term mindset.
What I look for when I hire Agile coaches
A product development background. It isn’t critical which specific history the person has as a developer, tester, product manager, UX designer, engineering manager… I want to see that they had direct experience shipping a product. Agile roles have been around long enough that there are now schools that train them, and then they go right into the profession. From my experience, Agile people without experience building products can have difficulty making the sometimes necessary trade-offs. They may focus too much on the “how” without understanding the “why,” “what,” or “when.”
Broad knowledge of Agile frameworks and techniques. While the core of Agile thinking has existed for many years, new practices and methods continue to evolve. Like any profession, I look for a candidate to demonstrate that they are not only keeping up but are interested in what is happening in their field.
Experience growing a team’s proficiency over time. As mentioned above, many Agile professionals get stuck in an endless series of Agile transformations at different companies. While this is a valuable experience for an Agile consultant, it isn’t practical for someone in a long-term role.
Pragmatic, not pedantic. Pragmatism is something I look for in everyone I hire. I would not expect this to be an issue for an Agile professional, but I have interviewed people whose definition of what was or was not correct was defined by a single book.
Knowing what good looks like. The characteristics of a high-performing Agile team are incredibly context-dependent. There is no single way to be an effective team. So how do you convince teams to invest in improvement? You need to give them a vision of what they can be, meaning you need to know what “good” looks like.
Knowing what bad looks like. The converse of knowing what good looks like is knowing what bad looks like. I want to hear what the candidate identifies as harmful patterns in a team. The patterns they identify help me understand how they look at teams. I also want to listen to their techniques for breaking teams out of these patterns. I want to hear what has worked and not worked for them.
A desire to build something bigger than themselves. I want to see some ambition in a coach. Not just to get a group working well but to redefine what a group can achieve with the proper support. If a candidate thinks their job is complete when the team has regular ceremonies, a groomed backlog, and a good flow of tickets, they probably aren’t what I am looking for.
Experience working with cross-functional stakeholders. Too many people view Agile as a software development thing, with defined boundaries aligned to the engineering team. Successful Agile organizations interface with the whole company, even if those functions do not choose to work in an Agile way.
Building an Agile coaching practice in your organization
If you want to develop a new Agile coaching practice within your organization, it is best to start slow. Hire one coach, and work with them to establish what the role means within your company. When the organization demands more time from them than they have to give, it will be time to hire a second coach, and so on.
Each coach should be able to support multiple teams, especially if you want the teams to own their practices instead of the coach (this is one reason why the coach should not be the scrum master for the groups they work with). Working with multiple groups also helps give some visibility across the organization about the quality of Agile practices and is an excellent conduit for best practice sharing.
You may have over-hired coaches when the Agile coaches start to drive their own deliverables and organize their work as a function. That may mean that the coach-to-team ratio is off.
If you are serious about evolving your Agile practice as an organization and improving your teams' quality, efficiency, and happiness, hire an Agile coach.
But make sure you hire the right one.
Upcoming talk
I’m giving a talk, “The path from Director to CTO: How to follow it, or how to mentor it,” at the LeadingEng conference in New York City in September. More information and registration: https://leaddev.com/leadingeng-new-york
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