From Scrum Master to Agile Coach

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Practical Agilist

8 min readJan 23, 2023

I get asked this question a lot, so I take that as a sign that perhaps I should spend some time writing a blog post. Hope this helps aspiring agile coaches. A lot of what I describe below may be helpful to those learning to become a Scrum Master for the first time as well, as every Scrum Master is also a coach for their team.

How DO you become an Agile Coach?

There is no clear path and frankly, most large organizations haven’t quite figured out the formal career path from Scrum Master to Agile Coach either. Some don’t even have agile titles yet! But I’d like to share some ideas that might at least help set your expectations and give you some ideas to make the transition over time.

First off, there are many ways to evolve yourself into an Agile Coach. In fact, I think that’s the coolest thing about the role. I’ve met so many different kinds of Agile Coaches over the years. While there may be some obvious must-have skills and experiences, you will likely bring some sort of unique twist to the role. So embrace it! I’ll share what I think some of those must-have skills are, but first let’s explore this uniqueness idea first.

Embrace your unique strengths and experiences

I’m reminded of Steve Job’s quote about connecting the dots and what it means to be smart. In his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement speech, he talks about connecting the dots and how life’s experiences, the things you are most passionate about, are something you need to pursue no matter what. He says, “…you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” He explains how he dropped out of college, but then pursued auditing some college courses just because he was curious, which is where he studied typography… which led, years lager, to the Macintosh computer being the first consumer device to have multiple type faces and proportionally spaced fonts which eventually led to TrueType Fonts, setting standards for the industry.

Steve Jobs delivers the Commencement address to Stanford graduates. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

The other quote from Steve Jobs, that I’ve conflated in my own mind because they seem very related, is about what it takes to be smart. He says it’s the ability to zoom out; like you have a positional advantage and can see the whole city at once to help explain how to get from point A to point B. And, when you bring your own unique perspective to this “being smart” analogy, Steve Jobs says:

“You have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does, or else you’re gonna make the same connections and you won’t be innovative. […] You might want to think about going to Paris and being a poet for a few years. Or you might want to go to a third-world country — I’d highly advise that. Falling in love with two people at once. Walt Disney took LSD, do you know that?”

The steps you’ve taken in your personal career that lead you to being an Agile Coach are these unique dots and areas of passion that you’ll be able to draw experience from in order to help teams and other individuals. Lean into your passions and don’t feel bad if your approach to becoming an Agile Coach doesn’t look like someone else’s or someone you admire.

What obvious must-have skills should all Agile Coaches have?

As I’ve said there’s probably no official curriculum to follow to become an Agile Coach. There are, however, clearly certifications and guides to help you figure this out. And while I’m not a big proponent of certifications in general, they are definitely helpful for those looking to get started. I tend to prefer ICAgile and their guide for expected “Agile Coaching Learning Outcomes,” in particular, is a great place to start.

I’ve also written about the guides and models out there describing “What makes a good Agile Coach?” Consider reading up on these: the Lyssa Adkins Agile Coaching Competency Framework, the Agility Health Radar, and the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel to understand the areas of competency, skills, and style that describe what it means to be a great coach.

Given all that, generically, I can tell you that no matter what path you take, you need to have both breadth and depth of experience. Which means things like being a great facilitator and having coached (as a scrum master or otherwise) multiple teams using different kinds of agile processes and frameworks. Ideally, you should also have some experience coaching leadership and coaching teams of teams using some sort of scaled agile approach. This experience often only happens over time, building on your prior successes. Most coaches start at the single team level or coaching a small handful of teams at a time. Leadership and teams of teams coaching often comes later.

Much of my own breadth of experience, working with teams and leadership in particular, came from non-agile-specific roles being a Technology Manager at big companies, the Chief Technology Officer of multiple startups, and spending many years in various consulting roles.

How much technology experience is required?

Not everyone begins their career as a programmer or engineer before they become an Agile Coach. But it sure is a huge advantage, in my opinion, if you do! But what if you’re not? Can you still be an Agile Coach? My answer is “Yes, but it depends.”

There are, of course, very technical Agile Coaches, who are capable of coaching teams of full-stack software engineers on advanced technology topics: Lean Software, DevOps, test-driven development strategies, and a host of other architecture and software engineering topics that dovetail nicely with the coaching skillset. You might hear this being called an Agile Technical Coach vs. an Agile Process Coach.

But, as I’ve said, there are no specific rules here. Except, I do think if you expect to be an Agile Coach for teams having anything to do with software, you should bring a degree of tech savviness and knowledge of product management to the table. Being able to carry a conversation with a technology team and understand the challenges and nuances related to software development is critical. So, make sure you build up that kind of exposure if you’re lacking in that area before attempting your first coaching role. A coach should be able to ask great questions and needs to understand enough about what technical practices look like as a team matures.

What other baseline knowledge and experience is expected?

While there is no hard-and-fast rule about what an Agile Coach must know to be able to do the job well, I do think there is an expectation about having a very well rounded and thorough understanding of the agile universe.

Topics such as the history of the agile manifesto, the history of agile (i.e. the Toyota Production System and the manufacturing evolution from Taylorism), all of the agile basics, and knowledge of the “agile famous” authors, see below). And obvious things like a thorough understanding of Psychological Safety (Amy Edmondson and Project Aristotle and re:Work at Google) and Servant Leadership (the 10 principles and Robert Greenleaf). Other obvious things like the evolution of Scrum, the Scrum Guide, the history of the Kanban Method (the Personal Kanban board as well as the Blue Book by David Anderson). Key concepts like Product Management, Design Thinking, and Customer Experience Journey Mapping techniques. You should know the key organizations (Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, and Business Agility Institute) and trustworthy boutique agile consulting firms. Ideally, you also have some knowledge and experience with many of the popular tools and process frameworks (i.e. Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean, LeSS, FAST, SAFe, Scrum at Scale, Nexus, Spotify, PMI-DA)

One should probably also be aware of some of the landmark books that are widely read and referenced by coaches, in no particular order.

I know that’s a long list of 28 books. But for coaches who have been working for years at their craft, they have likely read many of these. And if someone asks me “What should I read first” or if I need to help them get started on their learning journey, I often start by asking them to watch a few important agile-famous videos as well. Learning the mindset is the most important thing, in my opinion. Some of these books are product focused, some are mindset focused, some are leadership focused and you’ll have to pick your own path. Learning the mindset first is best done by reading and understanding the four values and twelve principles of the agile manifesto. More can be found in the Scrum Values, and a really great addition are the values found in Modern Agile.

Great Agile Videos

Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell

The most popular agile video ever by Henrik Kniberg

Greatness by David Marquet

However you carve your own career path, I hope you find your own special sauce and embrace your uniqueness. Be patient and invest in yourself. Know your strengths and work on your weaknesses. When in doubt, crank up the goofball and show your own vulnerability and lead by example!

Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com

How well is your team “being agile”? Our self-assessment tool focuses on 24 topics of modern ways of working including the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking. It comes with deep links into the Practical Agilist Guidebook to aid continuous improvement in teams of any kind. Learn more at MakeTeamsAwesome.com

The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an agile coach showing you why the topic is important, what you can start doing about it, scrum master tips, AI prompts to dig deeper, and tons of third party references describing similar perspectives. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com

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