Agile Coach / Senior Scrum Master Role

Role Requirement (Example)

Coaching & Mentoring

• Demonstrated and verifiable track record as an Agile Coach in both simple (single, autonomous teams) and complex (multi-team, interdependent) organizational environments, with observable outcomes, references, and sustained impact. This role requires depth of practice and professional maturity—not short-term role reassignment or accelerated title progression.
• Acts as a teacher, coach, and ambassador of Scrum and Agile, consistently modeling and reinforcing core principles, values, and norms that enable real agility rather than ceremonial process adoption.
• Delivers differentiated coaching across teams, Product Owners, Product Managers, and leadership, with a strong emphasis on product coaching: strengthening product discovery, ownership, value articulation, prioritization, and outcome-oriented decision-making.
• Provides guide-level coaching expertise, influencing individuals, teams, product leaders, and organizations through a well-developed and situationally appropriate repertoire of coaching tools, techniques, and interventions.
• Demonstrates a solid foundation of formal and informal coaching education, developed and refined over years of deliberate practice, reflection, and learning—treating coaching as a professional discipline, not a secondary skill.
• Exhibits strong facilitation and coaching capability, including group facilitation, leadership and product coaching, conflict navigation, and systemic interventions.
• Possesses deep, practical understanding of core agile frameworks (XP, Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban) and applies them thoughtfully to support effective product development and delivery in varied organizational contexts.
• Applies scaling approaches that reduce organizational complexity (e.g., LeSS, Nexus), with particular attention to organizational design, team topology, product ownership structures, and decision-making clarity.
• Partners closely with business stakeholders, product leadership, and customers to define product vision, clarify business value, shape customer journeys, and align strategy, discovery, and delivery.
• Demonstrates strong grounding in systems thinking, lean thinking, and system dynamics, enabling identification of root causes, feedback loops, and structural constraints that impact product outcomes and organizational behavior.
• Shows professional courage to surface and address anti-patterns and dysfunctions across teams, product organizations, and leadership levels, framing observations constructively and driving meaningful change.
• Communicates effectively with management and executive leadership, translating between strategy and execution and supporting leaders in evolving toward product-centric, adaptive organizations.
• Articulates a clear personal mentorship journey, including being mentored by experienced coaches, reflecting humility, continuous development, and respect for the coaching craft.
• Demonstrates strong mentorship capability, supporting the growth of Scrum Masters, coaches, Product Owners, and product leaders through guidance, feedback, and role modeling.
• Collaborates openly with other coaches and Scrum Masters, contributing to a cohesive, system-level coaching approach rather than operating in isolation.
• Maintains active engagement in the agile and product community, contributing to events, forums, and shared learning as part of ongoing professional development.

Training/Teaching

• The role requires a demonstrated and verifiable history of delivering professional, instructor-led training in both in-person and virtual environments. This capability reflects years of sustained practice and refinement, rather than a short-term transition into a training or coaching role. The individual is expected to show evidence that their training expertise has been developed through repeated delivery, continuous improvement, and measurable learner outcomes — not as a byproduct of a rapid career rebranding.
• The coach consistently delivers high-quality, structured, classroom-style training to diverse audiences, including cross-functional teams, leadership groups, and mixed-experience cohorts. Training sessions are designed and facilitated with clear learning objectives, intentional pacing, and a strong balance between theory, practice, and reflection, ensuring that participants can meaningfully apply concepts beyond the classroom.
• The role demands advanced teaching and facilitation capability, including the ability to adapt content and delivery style to audience maturity, organizational context, and learning needs. Facilitation is purposeful and disciplined, enabling active engagement, thoughtful discussion, and experiential learning rather than passive content consumption.
• In addition to delivery, the coach is responsible for designing and running professional training sessions, workshops, seminars, and instructor-led webinars that meet enterprise-level standards. This includes the ability to manage group dynamics, guide complex conversations, and maintain instructional clarity in both synchronous and asynchronous learning formats.
• A critical expectation of the role is the creation of outstanding training materials. The coach develops high-quality curricula, presentation decks, facilitator guides, exercises, and supporting artifacts that reflect deep subject-matter mastery and pedagogical rigor. These materials are not ad-hoc or one-off assets; they are thoughtfully constructed, reusable, and continuously refined based on learner feedback and observed outcomes. Over time, they become trusted reference materials and benchmarks for professional training within the organization.
• Collectively, these capabilities demonstrate that the individual approaches training as a serious professional discipline, grounded in experience, craftsmanship, and accountability for learning effectiveness — not as an incidental responsibility attached to a coaching title.

General Understanding of Agile Software Engineering

• One or more foundational certifications from recognized Scrum bodies, such as
  Scrum Alliance (CSM, CSPO, CSD) or Scrum.org (PSM, PSPO), demonstrating a solid grounding in Scrum principles and practices as applied in real organizational contexts. These credentials are expected to be supported by practical experience rather than held in isolation.
• Guide-level and senior practitioner certifications, such as
  Certified Team Coach (CTC) or Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) from Scrum Alliance, or Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) from Scrum.org, are considered a strong differentiator. These designations signal a depth of coaching practice, peer recognition, and a sustained commitment to the profession that goes well beyond entry-level or role-based certification.
• Advanced Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) credentials, including
  Certified LeSS Trainer (CLT), Certified LeSS Coach – Level 1 (CLC-1), or Certified LeSS Coach – Level 2 (CLC-2), reflecting proven capability in organizational design, systemic coaching, and reducing organizational complexity in multi-team environments.
• Professional coaching accreditation from the International Coaching Federation (ICF), indicating formal training and demonstrated competence in core coaching skills, ethical standards, and reflective practice — reinforcing coaching as a professional discipline rather than an auxiliary skill.
• Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) certification, evidencing a rigorous understanding of flow-based systems, evolutionary change, and lean principles, applied thoughtfully within organizational systems.

Collectively, these accreditations are expected to correlate with a verifiable history of coaching practice and organizational impact. They are not viewed as interchangeable badges or shortcuts to seniority, but as earned professional designations that reflect years of applied experience, continuous development, and recognition by respected industry institutions.

General