Cincinnati, Ohio
Contract: VMS
The Lead Agilist serves as a servant leader, coach, and facilitator within the Agile Center, partnering with one or more Agile Squads to drive the successful adoption and execution of Agile principles and Scrum practices. This role fosters high-performing, self-organizing teams by promoting continuous improvement, collaboration, transparency, and delivery of business value.
Leveraging strong coaching, facilitation, and leadership skills, the Lead Agilist guides Agile Squads in applying Agile values, Scrum principles, and modern delivery practices. The role helps teams identify and overcome impediments, improve team dynamics, optimize delivery processes, and continuously evolve through data-driven insights and inspect-and-adapt practices.
Key Responsibilities - Serve as a Scrum Master and Agile coach for one or more Agile Squads, ensuring effective application of Agile values, principles, and Scrum practices.
- Facilitate Scrum events, including Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and Backlog Refinement sessions.
- Coach Product Owners and development teams on effective backlog management, value delivery, prioritization, and goal setting.
- Foster team self-organization, continuous improvement, cross-functional collaboration, and shared accountability.
- Identify, address, and remove team impediments while escalating organizational barriers when appropriate.
- Build a trusting, psychologically safe environment where open communication, collaboration, and innovation thrive.
- Utilize empirical data, team metrics, and feedback loops to guide continuous improvement and team effectiveness.
- Coach teams in dependency management, conflict resolution, risk identification, and Agile delivery best practices.
- Partner with stakeholders across the organization to improve Agile maturity and promote Agile ways of working.
- Shield Agile Squads from unnecessary interruptions and external distractions, enabling focus on delivering customer value.
- Promote quality engineering and delivery practices, including Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Test-Driven Development, and automation practices.
- Leverage knowledge of Agile frameworks and methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, and Extreme Programming (XP) to support team growth and effectiveness.
- Lead through influence, servant leadership, and example while fostering a culture of learning, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Support organizational risk management practices by identifying, assessing, monitoring, and communicating risks that may impact delivery or customer outcomes.
Required Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
- 5+ years of professional business experience.
- 3+ years of experience serving as a Scrum Master, Agilist, or Agile Coach.
- Strong knowledge of Agile principles, Scrum framework, and servant leadership practices.
- Proven experience coaching and developing high-performing Agile teams.
- Excellent facilitation, presentation, mentoring, and communication skills across all organizational levels.
- Demonstrated ability to influence without authority and effectively navigate organizational challenges.
- Strong conflict resolution, mediation, and problem-solving skills.
- Experience identifying and removing team and organizational impediments.
- Ability to analyze and leverage team metrics and empirical data to drive continuous improvement.
Preferred Qualifications - Experience working within software development and product delivery environments.
- Working knowledge of modern Agile engineering practices including Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Test-Driven Development (TDD), and automated testing.
- Familiarity with Agile frameworks and practices such as Kanban, Scrumban, XP, and Mob Programming.
- Scrum Master, Agile Coaching, or related Agile certifications preferred.
By submitting your application, you acknowledge that recruiting technologies, including AI-assisted tools, may be used to support candidate evaluation, sourcing, matching, and communications.
