Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Agile Delivery Lead

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Agile Delivery Lead to orchestrate and accelerate the delivery of complex software and product initiatives across multiple cross-functional teams. The Agile Delivery Lead combines program delivery discipline with servant-leadership and agile coaching to remove impediments, align stakeholders, and ensure predictable, high-quality releases. This role requires hands-on experience with scaled agile frameworks (SAFe, LeSS, or Nexus), strong program and stakeholder management, and the ability to translate strategic roadmaps into executable increments of work.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Scrum Master or Lead Scrum Master
Technical Program Manager / Program Delivery Manager
Senior Product Owner / Product Manager

Advancement To:

Head of Delivery / Director of Delivery
Agile Program Manager / Program Director
VP of Engineering or Chief Delivery Officer

Lateral Moves:

Agile Coach / Organizational Agile Coach
Product Strategy / Product Operations Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Serve as the primary delivery owner for one or several value streams, coordinating multiple Scrum/Kanban teams to ensure end-to-end delivery of product increments aligned to business objectives and release milestones.
Lead PI (Program Increment) planning sessions and quarterly roadmapping workshops, translating strategic priorities into prioritized backlogs, dependencies, and committed objectives.
Facilitate cross-team synchronization (Scrum of Scrums, ART syncs) to identify and resolve inter-team dependencies, drive trade-off decisions, and maintain a continuous flow of value.
Act as the servant-leader and coach for Scrum Masters and Product Owners—improving agile practices, promoting servant leadership, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and outcome-based delivery.
Own program-level risk, issue, and impediment management: proactively escalate unresolved risks to senior stakeholders, negotiate mitigation plans, and track residual risk to closure.
Define and track program KPIs (velocity trends, predictability, escape defects, cycle time, lead time, release frequency) and present concise, data-driven progress reports to senior leadership and stakeholders.
Partner closely with Product Management and Engineering leadership to maintain and groom program backlogs, ensure alignment between product roadmap and engineering capacity, and facilitate backlog prioritization.
Drive continuous delivery adoption and DevOps best practices by collaborating with engineering, QA, and platform teams to optimize CI/CD pipelines, test automation, and deployment cadence.
Establish and manage a robust release management process—coordinate release trains, cutover plans, rollbacks, and release communications across business, security, and operations teams.
Coordinate third-party vendors and contractors impacting delivery, ensuring contractual SLAs are met, dependencies are managed, and vendor deliverables integrate seamlessly into program milestones.
Create transparent status artifacts (program burn-downs, milestone roadmaps, dependency maps, risk registers) that enable better decision-making and cross-functional alignment.
Plan and manage resource capacity across teams, identify skill gaps, and collaborate with People Operations to staff, onboard, and retain top delivery talent.
Design and run regular health checks (team health metrics, technical debt reviews, process retros) and lead action-oriented retrospectives that drive measurable process improvements.
Translate strategic business goals into measurable objectives and key results (OKRs) for delivery teams, and ensure cadence of OKR reviews that tie delivery outcomes to business impact.
Maintain strong stakeholder engagement by running governance forums, steering committees, and executive briefings to communicate roadmap changes, risks, and delivery forecasts.
Champion agile scaling initiatives (SAFe, LeSS, Nexus) where relevant—tailoring frameworks pragmatically to organizational maturity and coaching leaders on change adoption.
Drive quality and compliance initiatives by partnering with security, compliance, and QA leads to ensure releases meet regulatory, privacy, and security standards.
Manage program budgets and fiscal forecasts related to delivery activities, including headcount planning, tool subscriptions, and vendor costs, to ensure cost-effective delivery.
Actively remove operational blockers: negotiate cross-functional trade-offs, secure executive decisions when needed, and ensure teams remain focused on delivering customer value.
Ensure continuous knowledge sharing and documentation of delivery practices, playbooks, runbooks, and lessons learned to increase organizational delivery maturity.
Facilitate cross-functional design and discovery sessions early in the delivery lifecycle to de-risk solutions and validate assumptions with prototypes, experiments, and user feedback.
Lead onboarding and maturity-building programs for newly formed teams or reorganizations to accelerate time-to-productivity and alignment with delivery standards.
Drive metrics-driven retrospectives and A/B experiments to validate process changes and iterate on how teams plan, estimate, and deliver value more predictably.
Support organizational transformation initiatives by coaching senior leaders, designing change roadmaps, and helping the organization evolve towards outcome-oriented delivery.

Secondary Functions

Facilitate ad-hoc stakeholder meetings and exploratory discovery sessions to clarify requirements, scope, and acceptance criteria for complex features.
Support tooling adoption (Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, Rally) by defining workflows, dashboards, and automation rules that improve traceability and reporting.
Assist Product and UX partners with customer feedback loops and beta programs to validate hypothesis-driven development and prioritized roadmaps.
Contribute to hiring panels, interview loops, and mentoring programs to raise delivery team capability and culture.
Collaborate with data analytics, platform, and security teams to ensure observability, monitoring, and post-release incident management processes are in place.
Help shape contractual SLOs and service agreements for internal and external stakeholders tied to delivery SLAs and uptime commitments.
Participate in procurement and evaluation of delivery tools, tooling integrations, and platform investments to streamline program execution.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Deep practical knowledge of Agile frameworks: Scrum, Kanban, and scaled approaches such as SAFe, LeSS, or Nexus; experience tailoring frameworks to context.
Program and portfolio management experience coordinating multiple cross-functional teams and release trains.
Proficiency with Agile tooling: Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, Rally, or similar — including workflow design, dashboards, and automation.
Strong metrics and reporting skills: designing and interpreting velocity, cycle time, lead time, burn-up/burn-down, and release predictability metrics.
Experience with CI/CD concepts, release orchestration, and working knowledge of DevOps practices and toolchains (Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, etc.).
Risk management and dependency mapping at scale; able to design mitigation plans and maintain risk registers.
Familiarity with technical concepts and software architecture to communicate effectively with engineering leads and evaluate technical trade-offs.
Budgeting and resource capacity planning for program-level financial management.
Vendor and contract management to integrate third-party deliverables into program schedules.
Experience designing and running PI planning, system demos, and program increment retrospectives.

Soft Skills

Excellent stakeholder management and executive communication: able to synthesize complex delivery status into concise, actionable briefings.
Coaching and servant-leadership: ability to mentor Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and senior leaders to adopt agile mindsets.
Facilitation and conflict resolution: skilled at running workshops, aligning divergent views, and negotiating trade-offs.
Strategic thinking with a bias for action: translate strategy into deliverable outcomes and pragmatic experiments.
Strong organizational and prioritization skills in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
Empathy and team-building orientation to foster psychological safety and high-performing teams.
Data-driven decision-making: use metrics and evidence to validate assumptions and guide continuous improvement.
Adaptability and resilience: lead through change and manage competing priorities effectively.
Attention to quality, security, and compliance in regulated environments.
Clear written and verbal communication with experience producing program-level documentation and playbooks.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree (MBA, MSc) or relevant certifications in Agile/Project Management (SAFe Program Consultant SPC, Certified Scrum Professional CSP, PMI-ACP, PMP).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Technology / Systems
Business Administration / Management
Human-Computer Interaction / Product Design

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5–10+ years in software delivery, with at least 3–5 years in leadership of agile teams or program delivery roles.

Preferred:

Demonstrated experience running scaled agile delivery (enterprise-level), leading cross-functional engineering and product teams, and delivering complex roadmaps across multiple quarters. Practical experience with CI/CD, DevOps, and modern tooling in SaaS or cloud-native environments.