The Alternative To Agile Coaches - Silicon Valley Product Group

This post from Cagan vibes so much with me. I've long struggled with having dedicated Agile Coaches or Scrum Masters. There have been several times when I have had those roles in organizations, but I see that as a training moment for managers and leaders to learn from them how to do it themselves.

So if Team Blue is actually Agile, yet they don’t have any Agile coaches and never have, how did they become this way?

The answer is that this is what competent managers do at good product companies.

The engineering managers (along with the more senior engineers) have a responsibility to coach and develop their engineers to learn difficult skills such as getting to the point where the team can ship frequent, small, reliable, uncoupled releases.

Similarly, the managers of product management and product design have a responsibility to coach and develop their product managers and product designers to work with engineering to consistently and responsibly discover solutions to the problems they’ve been asked to solve.

This is the model that I think is needed. Managers have the accountability to the organization for what their teams are delivering, and it only makes sense that they serve these roles directly. Said another way, I don't think you would want to hand over something so critical to other people that don't have that responsibility.