What would you say… you do here?

Sometimes I forget just how misunderstood the role of Agile Coach is in the world. The recruiters don’t know what we do. The hiring managers don’t know what we do. Even many of the senior leadership team doesn’t get it.

I’ve rediscovered this idea today. And it’s true no matter what your job is:

You need to be able to say what you do very clearly.

I am many months into my job search and not proud to have just thought about spending some time on this. While I do well describing myself and my strengths when given an opportunity, I fear I’m not getting as many opportunities to do that as I could.

If you are an Agile Coach, see if this resonates with you. It may sound bold, but this is how I think I’d like to start some new conversations.

I can make any team better.

My experience is in working with teams. All kinds of teams. From Python, NoSQL and custom coding to Marketing. DevOps, containers, continuous delivery. Single product focused startups. Facilities — literally moving boxes and emptying warehouses. Huge hadoop chemistry databases. Business teams focused on white gloved customer service for Wealth Management. Salesforce. JIRA administration and support teams. ServiceNow. Even leadership using Kanban for the Transformation itself kind of teams.

Whether your team is a group of firemen, HR generalists, small or big business, technical, or non-technical… I can help.

An Agile Coach with great breadth and depth of experience is versatile. We can help a team posit the right experiments with technology to decide how to best serve their customers using A/B environments to quantitatively prove which idea generates better results, for example.

We can help a Scrum Master and their leaders forge new ground and challenge old assumptions… even business rules that have existed for decades. Why is there a rule that every expense over $500 needs to go through three levels of leadership for approval? Let’s fix that together and make the business process more meaningful and elegant to get things done sooner… helping leaders apply Systems Thinking concepts.

And yes, we may ask the team to play with Legos. We may ask uncomfortable questions about how you feel. We may call on people during agile events to be sure we’ve heard enough ideas before proceeding. We might act silly or show a ridiculously funny bad lip reading video and turn it into a lesson about an agile behavior or concept the team should embody.

We will challenge you by asking “how might we”? We may even throw out the rulebook and purposefully suggest we alter the way the team is working even — gasp — if it violates the rules of Scrum or SAFe, just to help the team learn and deliver value better.

I help teams deliver better products faster.

In working with teams, I will use every trick up my sleeves to help the team find their way. Every team is different and needs different things. It might be straight process changes. It might be personal relationships, trust, and dysfunction that needs untangling. It might even not be the team, but the relationship between them and their leaders that needs to be healed. It might be technical excellence and finding better ways to refactor or push quality upstream. And yes, I may suggest an experiment to put a developer and a tester on the same keyboard and mouse to work as one and learn each other’s craft better to become a better team. We will focus on making learning part of everything we do.

I will of course mentor the Scrum Masters. And work diligently to help our Product Owners and Product Managers who have the toughest job of all. We will roll up our sleeves and discuss the depths of your backlog and Product Roadmap together. I may challenge you to delete a year old user story. We may decide to stop estimating for a while to see if helps or hurts. And if we need to relearn how to write user stories or break work down, we’ll definitely be doing that. Every team I touch learns to think iteratively.

We will navigate change together, no matter how uncomfortable for a while, to become the team we need to be… that lives up to our purpose, delivering value consistently, utilizing metrics appropriately to decide what to do next, talking to actual customers as often as necessary, and really exploring why we do the work we do so that everyone on the team knows their purpose, why they exist, and how our customer will be impacted by the work we do… so we can have a sense of pride in the work we do.

Together, you will learn to say the most important thing to your stakeholders:

“Our team guarantees that we are working on the absolute most important outcomes for our customers at all times and will deliver incremental and demonstrable value every two weeks!”

And when you can do these things on your own, I will sadly move on.

Your stories become my stories. Thank you. I will retell them to other teams so they may learn to embrace change in a new and meaningful way, applying lessons learned by thousands of others before them.

I am an accumulation of stories and lessons and successes and failures.

My passion and my stories work on every team I’ve worked with. You will learn a lot through the process. And whether we spend just a month or two together or experience blood, sweat, and tears over a year or more, you and I will both be changed forever.

That’s how it works.

These are just some of the ways I help teams.

I look forward to learning about yours. Challenge me. What difficult problems are you facing? Where do you need to improve? Or do you need help figuring that out?

I am armed with thousands of stories, experiences, books, obscure blog posts, and a wealth of common knowledge I have learned from my peers. And I would welcome the opportunity to work together to help you and your team find the thing you need to become a better version of yourselves.

Book an appointment for us to talk: https://tidycal.com/practicalagilist/consultation

Or read my book first to figure out where you might need some help.

https://amzn.to/4fbROaG

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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense.

The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an Agile Coach showing you why each topic is important, what you can start doing about it, Scrum Master and leadership tips, AI prompts to help you explore and dig deeper, and tons of recommended books, videos, and articles. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com

How well is your team “being agile”? Find out at MeasureTheMindset.com. Our self-assessment tool focuses on the same 24 topics from the Guidebook and covers the modern ways of working, a combination of the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking.