During a portfolio review, a visibly frustrated VP of Product dropped the mic:
“We have eight Agile Coaches and we’re still missing deadlines. What are they even doing?”
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. And one of the coaches decided to answer it, not with a defense of rituals or a report on coaching hours, but with a new set of questions:
What does your roadmap planning process look like?
Who decides what gets funded and when?
How often does customer feedback reshape your priorities?
How are you deriving these timelines (hint: they weren't involving the team's capacity in their discussions)
That single conversation shifted everything. They mapped how long it took to go from idea to outcome. They saw where decisions were delayed, how delivery teams were overloaded with projects that weren’t on the original plan, and how strategic goals had no room to pivot. Within a quarter, they’d reshaped how the roadmap was built, improved decision flow, and replaced “on time” with “on learning” as a goal.
The VP no longer asked what the coaches were doing. She started asking for their time.
Did you know we should be helping facilitate stakeholders and product? What a big win we can make there.
What.
Too often, Agile Coaches and/or Scrum Masters are brought in as a bandage for delivery dysfunction. They’re expected to run ceremonies better, bump up velocity, or “get the teams more Agile.”
But agility isn’t a performance patch. It’s a mindset shift. And coaching isn’t about rituals, it’s about rewiring how the organization thinks and operates.
Real Agile Coaches partner with leadership to explore how the business makes trade-offs, learns from failure, funds innovation, and builds sustainable delivery systems. They are pattern-shapers, not process-holders.
They work across roles and functions, making the invisible friction in decision-making, incentives, and culture visible so it can be addressed.
So What?
When leaders expect coaches to enforce rituals instead of enabling transformation, they burn through talent and miss the opportunity. Good coaches leave. Teams disengage. And agility becomes a bureaucratic brand, not a competitive advantage.
It’s not that the coaches aren’t doing anything; it’s that they haven’t been asked to do the thing that actually changes outcomes: coaching the system, not just the teams.
When leaders shift their expectations from performance management to organizational development, they unlock the full potential of Agile coaching.
Now What?
Here’s what you can do:
Leaders: Invite your Agile Coaches into conversations about how roadmaps, budgets, and goals are formed, not just how sprints are tracked. Ask them what they see across teams, and where they’d invest coaching effort.
Agile Coaches: Stop waiting for permission to coach at the system level. Ask better questions. Help leaders see beyond velocity to flow, beyond throughput to alignment, beyond process to purpose.
Everyone: Recognize that the work of agility isn’t just at the team level. It lives in the choices leadership makes about how work is shaped, prioritized, funded, and delivered.
Let's Do This!
The most valuable Agile Coaches don’t just deliver Scrum. They elevate leadership.
They’re not measuring story points: they’re helping leaders measure what matters.
They’re not enforcing frameworks: they’re enabling flow.
They’re not managing output: they’re stewarding transformation.
So if you’re asking, “What are our coaches actually doing?” you may be missing the bigger question:
“What could they unlock if we let them?”