Agile Team Coach

Overview

Guardian’s Digital and Technology (D&T) organization is undergoing a transformation to drive the growth and future strategy of the business. The Team Coach will participate in these efforts by guiding the adoption and execution of a product operating model, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and collaborative problem-solving. The Team Coach will establish and drive team best practices, facilitate standard ceremonies, provide training, mentoring, and practical assistance to improve team performance and support timely delivery, aligning with product vision and customer objectives. 

You Are:  

A change agent and facilitator, driving team focus on product delivery and business outcomes. The ideal candidate will be highly collaborative, influential and passionate about creating impactful change for the organization. 

You Will:  

• Coach product teams on agile practices to drive delivery discipline and predictability.  Provide 1:1 role-based coaching for Product Owners and other team members to strengthen agile maturity. 

• Leverage coaching methodologies to actively support cross-functional product teams in improving collaboration, accelerating delivery cadence, and achieving measurable outcomes aligned with product goals. 

• Facilitate team-level ceremonies (e.g., planning, stand-ups, retrospectives) to ensure effective collaboration, alignment and dependency management. 

• Actively coordinate interaction with other teams to manage cross-team dependencies and maintain alignment. Escalate blockers to leadership promptly to ensure timely resolution. 

• Foster and coach multiple teams in improving team performance through continued inspection of team practices and testing new approaches.  

• Work with teams to define and develop objectives and key results (OKRs) and ensure strategic alignment to enterprise and value stream level priorities, track progress and achievement of goals through performance dashboards. 

• Guide teams to leverage flow and outcome metrics responsibly to inform their improvement without driving unhealthy behaviors; assist teams with tailored coaching plans and targeted initiatives to drive team performance and maturity. 

• Act as an active member of the Center of Excellence, contributing to standards, best practices and continuous evolution of the operating model. 

• Partner with Product Owners to build and facilitate a strong backlog aligned with product strategy and priorities. 

• Work with stakeholders to support the teams’ needs and maintain alignment with product goals 

• Ensure the team understands how their work ties back to the product / value stream OKRs. 

You Have:  

• 3-7 years of proven experience in roles such as Scrum master and Agile coach, coaching multiple agile teams in a scaled environment. 

• Strong knowledge of agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, etc.) with experience in Agile project management practices and ability to lead and reinforce strong team habits 

• Ability to strongly coach and drive improvements for the team through supportive and adaptive techniques. 

• Experience with agile tooling (e.g., Jira, SPM) and providing best practices for use and adoption across an organization 

• Experience with OKR development and refinement, and outcome-based performance tracking. 

• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and technology deliverables. 

• Familiarity with product platform construct preferred. 

• Familiarity with engineering practices such as test automation, CI/CD, and DevOps. 

• Excellent facilitation, communication, and interpersonal skills.  

Location:

• Three days a week at a Guardian office in New York, NY, Holmdel, NJ or Bethlehem, PA.