Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Agile Project Manager

💰 $ - $

Project ManagementAgileSoftware Development

🎯 Role Definition

The Agile Project Manager (also known as Agile Delivery Manager or Agile Coach/PM hybrid) leads and coordinates cross-functional engineering and product teams to deliver software and digital products using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe or hybrid Agile frameworks. This role focuses on end-to-end delivery: sprint planning, backlog management, release and dependency coordination, metrics and reporting, risk mitigation, and continuous improvement while acting as a servant leader to remove impediments and foster high-performing teams.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Scrum Master with experience coaching multiple teams
  • Technical Project Manager / Software Project Manager
  • Product Owner or Business Analyst with delivery experience

Advancement To:

  • Program Manager / Release Train Engineer (RTE)
  • Director of Delivery / Head of Agile / Head of Engineering Operations
  • Senior Product or Portfolio Manager / VP of Product Delivery

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Manager
  • Agile Coach / Enterprise Agile Coach
  • Delivery Lead for larger programs or transformation initiatives

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead, coordinate and manage multiple cross-functional Agile teams (development, QA, UX, DevOps) to deliver prioritized product increments on predictable cadence while ensuring alignment to product strategy and business outcomes.
  • Facilitate all Agile ceremonies (sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, backlog refinement) and ensure that timeboxed meetings deliver clear outcomes and actionable next steps.
  • Partner closely with Product Owners to maintain a prioritized, well-groomed backlog with clear acceptance criteria, user stories and definition of done so teams can deliver high-quality increments each sprint.
  • Plan, coordinate and manage release trains and program-level dependencies across teams, including planning PI/Program Increments, coordinating across stakeholders, and ensuring smooth cross-team integration and delivery.
  • Proactively identify, escalate and remove impediments, blockers and organizational constraints that inhibit team velocity or quality, working with engineering, product, operations and leadership to drive resolution.
  • Drive continuous improvement by capturing retrospective action items, implementing experiments, measuring outcomes, and institutionalizing best practices that increase predictability and throughput.
  • Track, analyze and report Agile and delivery metrics (velocity, burn-down, cycle time, lead time, deployment frequency, escaped defects) to stakeholders and leadership to provide visibility into team performance and risk.
  • Manage scope, schedule, budget and resource allocations for assigned projects and delivery streams, ensuring trade-offs are understood and decisions are aligned with business priorities.
  • Coordinate with architecture, infrastructure and security teams to ensure technical dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing and release processes meet performance, compliance and reliability requirements.
  • Lead stakeholder engagement and communications across product management, engineering, QA, operations and business partners to clarify priorities, trade-offs, and delivery timelines.
  • Implement and scale Agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS) across teams or programs, tailoring practices to organizational context and maturity while driving adoption and governance.
  • Facilitate cross-team dependency mapping and risk mitigation, creating and maintaining RAID logs (risks, actions, issues, decisions) and ensuring timely escalation to program or portfolio leadership.
  • Drive adoption of DevOps practices by collaborating with engineering leads to improve automation, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and deployment frequency to reduce lead time for changes.
  • Coach and mentor Scrum Masters, Product Owners and team members on Agile principles, servant leadership, backlog refinement and estimation techniques (story points, t-shirt sizing).
  • Produce executive-level status reports and dashboards that translate technical delivery details into business impact and highlight schedule, scope and budget variances.
  • Conduct capacity planning and resource forecasting, collaborating with people managers to align staffing plans to roadmap commitments and peak delivery windows.
  • Manage vendor and third-party delivery relationships and contracts to ensure external dependencies meet performance SLAs and integration timelines.
  • Maintain quality and compliance standards by ensuring definition of done includes testing, documentation, security and regulatory checks where applicable.
  • Coordinate user acceptance testing (UAT) planning with business stakeholders and support production rollouts, post-release monitoring and incident remediation.
  • Lead change management activities related to feature rollouts or process changes; create communication plans, sponsor engagement and training materials to drive adoption.
  • Facilitate product and technical decision-making sessions, ensuring decisions are evidence-based, documented, and aligned with product vision and architectural constraints.
  • Create and maintain project artifacts (roadmaps, release plans, sprint plans, retrospectives, risk registers, decision logs) and make them accessible in collaboration tools for transparency.
  • Champion metrics-driven delivery improvements by establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to business outcomes (time-to-market, defect escape rate, customer satisfaction) and iterating based on results.
  • Support recruitment, onboarding and development of delivery team members to build high-performing teams and a culture of ownership and continuous learning.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist Product Management in defining MVP scope, release sequencing and go-to-market readiness activities.
  • Help design and run cross-functional workshops (story mapping, user journey mapping, root cause analysis) to align teams and stakeholders.
  • Support incident response and post-mortem analysis to identify process and tooling improvements that prevent recurrence.
  • Maintain and evolve tooling and templates for project reporting, risk management and retrospective capture to scale delivery practices across the organization.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep knowledge of Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS) and practical experience implementing them at team and program levels.
  • Hands-on experience with Agile planning and tracking tools such as Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, Rally or VersionOne for backlog management, reporting and documentation.
  • Strong capability with release management and CI/CD concepts, and familiarity with tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or Azure Pipelines.
  • Experience coordinating technical dependencies and integrations across microservices or distributed systems and working with DevOps/Cloud teams (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Proficiency in Agile metrics and analytics: velocity, burn-down/up, cycle time, throughput, cumulative flow diagrams and using dashboards for data-driven decisions.
  • Risk, issue and dependency management skills, including maintaining RAID logs and performing impact analysis.
  • Solid understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC), QA/testing practices, automated testing strategies and test environments.
  • Experience with backlog refinement, user story writing, acceptance criteria, estimation techniques (planning poker, story points).
  • Familiarity with portfolio and program management tools and practices (Program Increment planning, Release Train planning).
  • Capability to create executive-level reporting and roadmaps using PowerPoint, Excel, Tableau, Power BI or Google Data Studio.
  • Knowledge of compliance, security and regulatory considerations related to software delivery (e.g., GDPR, PCI, HIPAA) where applicable.
  • Preferred certifications: Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), PMI-ACP, PMP, SAFe Agilist — practical experience and certification to guide teams.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional stakeholder management and executive communication skills; able to translate technical status to business impact and influence decision-makers.
  • Strong facilitation and coaching skills to run effective ceremonies, workshops and retrospectives that drive measurable improvements.
  • Proven leadership and servant-leader mindset, able to motivate teams without direct authority and build psychological safety.
  • Advanced problem-solving and conflict resolution skills with a focus on outcomes and root-cause elimination.
  • Excellent prioritization and time-management skills; able to balance competing demands and make trade-off decisions under uncertainty.
  • Adaptability and resilience in fast-paced, ambiguous environments; drives clarity through structure and iterative delivery.
  • High emotional intelligence and situational awareness to manage team dynamics, stakeholder expectations and escalations.
  • Strong negotiation skills for scope, prioritization, resource allocation and vendor/service level discussions.
  • Collaborative mindset with ability to work effectively across product, engineering, QA, security, operations and business functions.
  • Continuous learning orientation and ability to mentor/juniorize teams in Agile practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MSc, MS, MBA) or equivalent graduate-level business/technology education.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Business Administration / Project Management
  • Industrial Engineering / Operations Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5–10+ years in project/program delivery roles with 3+ years specifically in Agile delivery or Scrum Master/Agile Project Manager positions.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years of delivery experience in software or digital product environments, experience scaling Agile across multiple teams or programs, and at least one major Agile transformation or SAFe implementation.
  • Certifications such as CSM, PSM, PMI-ACP, PMP, or SAFe Agilist are strongly preferred.
  • Demonstrated experience with cloud-native architectures, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing and working with remote/distributed teams.
Explore More Careers