Agile Coach

**Job purpose**
M&S is on a journey to shift to becoming a more product-led organisation that embraces business agility to create great, seamless omnichannel experiences for our customers. To support us on this journey, we are seeking a growth oriented and passionate coach to join our team and play a pivotal role in the evolution and maturity of lean, agile and product at M&S, working closely with teams and leadership alike, across both technical and non-technical areas of the organisation.

As a M&S Agile Coach, you will take a hands-on approach to accelerate us on the journey from project to product, working with teams directly to help solve their problems, delivering training tailored to specific roles

**Description
**This is an exciting opportunity to join a leading British retailer that serves millions of customers around the world and to lead significant change across the organisation following the launch of its new strategy focused on creating business agility with a steadfast focus on improving the omnichannel customer experience.

In this role you will be responsible for shaping and driving adoption of agile practices and acting as a key ambassador for the move from project to product across over 100 agile delivery teams, Delivery leads, Product Managers, and business partners. You will be responsible for championing the use of metrics to supervise and measure the success of our adoption of a product-led approach and coach colleagues to build an agile attitude focused on continuous improvement and customer and business value.

We are looking for someone that lives Agile, is passionate about making a real difference to our people and the business and is eager to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in to inspire change.

**Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities**:

- Champion and drive agile approaches and product ways of working throughout the organisation, acting as a role model and coach to individuals, teams, leadership and business partners on agile, product and scaled agile standard methodologies to drive the strategic vision from Project to Product
- Provide practical contextual and tailored coaching guidance, both technical and non-technical, to help M&S adopt and embed new ways of working aligned to the needs of the customer and business
- Establish and ensure adoption of standards, ceremonies for agile ways of working
- Own the assessment and enhancement of product and team maturity through conducting maturity assessments and developing quarterly plans with teams and partners to drive improvements; work with teams to surface problems and support in resolving them.
- Support creating agile transformation roadmaps, driving stronger and deeper agile understanding and results throughout the organisation with defining outcomes
- Collaborate with the People and Capability Development team to develop, deliver and/or coordinate with external providers to provision training and workshops on agile and product practices
- Develop learning materials and run Lunch and Learns/Brown bag talks to over 200+ people
- Challenge existing processes and remove impediments to achieving improved agile adoption, demonstrating fast feedback cycles to validate the approach
- Supervise and communicate progress of key transformation metrics to partners (tech and business leaders)
- Keep up to date with industry trends relating to Business Agility, Product and DevOps and maintain an involvement in industry agile communities to continuously bring new methods and ideas to the organisation.
- Assist with establishing communities of practice and developing a culture of continuous improvement across teams.
- Collaborate with the wider Tech Transformation team to align on initiatives, and support in shaping new ways forwards.
**Key Experience**
Essential**:

- Deep expertise in and working experience of Agile Methodologies and practices including Scrum, Kanban and DevOps in a Product-Led and Delivery Organisation
- Extensive experience coaching and mentoring individuals and groups and facilitating training sessions across team, program and leadership levels (technical and non-technical audiences)
- Understanding of engineering practices like BDD, XP and Agile Testing, Continuous Integration and Continuous delivery and able to facilitate, understand, and contribute to technical discussions
Genuine passion for helping others grow through coaching and mentoring
- Passion to kickstart and re-ignite new and existing teams into new ways of working where one size doesn’t always fit all
- Solid understanding of agile tools and software e.g., Jira, Jira Align, Confluence, Rally, Miro and Mentimeter
- Demonstrated ability to influence change and resolve issues at the leadership level.
- Strong problem-solving skills that can be applied to resolve complex business and technical challenges.
- Experience developing and tracking agile transformation metrics and using them to inform roadmaps.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate comp