Enterprise Agile Coach

Company Description

PubMatic (Nasdaq: PUBM) is an independent technology company maximizing customer value by delivering digital advertising’s supply chain of the future. PubMatic’s sell-side platform empowers the world’s leading digital content creators across the open internet to control access to their inventory and increase monetization by enabling marketers to drive return on investment and reach addressable audiences across ad formats and devices. Since 2006, our infrastructure-driven approach has allowed for the efficient processing and utilization of data in real time. By delivering scalable and flexible programmatic innovation, we improve outcomes for our customers while championing a vibrant and transparent digital advertising supply chain.

At PubMatic, we have 25+ experienced and self-sufficient scrum teams, each contributing towards building new product features and enhancing the existing ones in the overall platform. These teams often collaborate as part of complex cross functional product development initiatives & programs. Our product development processes and set agile maturity model guide these teams to ensure they operate efficiently and effectively.

We are looking for an experienced enterprise agile coach to help us further strengthen our scrum best practices. The enterprise agile coach will analyze our existing setup and implement improvements to help streamline and create efficiencies. The enterprise agile coach will refine existing training modules, and enable the scrum masters, product owners, and developers through classroom trainings & hands-on problem solving. The agile coach will help establish a refined agile maturity model based on industry best practices & our specific needs; run periodic assessments based on the maturity model to define short and long term improvement areas for the teams; drive focused efforts towards common challenges; and play a key role in improving the overall agile maturity of the organization in time bound manner to help our geographically distributed teams deliver better products in a faster, more efficient manner.

Contract duration: 6 months

Objectives of This Role:

The Enterprise Agile Coach will report to the Director of Program Management and will bear extreme importance due to the nature of duties it will perform. This role will have following main areas of responsibility:

• Collaborate with program management, product development & engineering leaders to analyze current setup & processes, carry out gap analysis, and design a strategy for refining & strengthening agile best practices.
• Refine/create training modules and lead at least one round of agile workshops & classroom trainings for each scrum role and teams. Ensure everyone in the development organization understands the values of agile product development methodologies.
• Groom scrum masters into scrum champions and evangelists. Establish Community of Practice (CoP) for their continuous collaboration and learning.
• Establish a refined agile maturity model based on industry best practices and needs very specific to PubMatic. Educate scrum teams, leadership, and other required stakeholders on it to achieve complete adoption.
• Run at least two full agile maturity assessments based on the refined maturity model with each scrum team to identify gaps and improvement areas.
• Drive the action items resulting from maturity assessment to completion through consistent mentoring in teams’ regular scrum ceremonies. Apply focused efforts on teams that are lagging. Take 100% of the teams to highest possible maturity defined in the model.
• Drive championing of agile mindset. Promote a culture of continuous improvement through inspection & adaptation.

Key Responsibilities:

• Carry out gap analysis, and design a strategy for achieving short-term and long-term improvement measures within defined timelines. Prioritize solving for known high-impact issues.
• Conduct brainstorming sessions with required stakeholders to refine the agile maturity model by considering industry best practices, and specific needs of the organization’s setup.
• Attend ceremonies of scrum teams and provide run-time mentoring and coaching. Observe common trends and derive action plans to address those.
• Facilitate learning and development through individual and team training. Coach senior stakeholders on agile best practices to ensure adoption from the top down. Communicate agile principles, scrum practices, and overall operating model across the organization.
• Establish a community of practices (CoPs) for scrum masters and product owners. Mentor, motivate, and enable scrum masters to drive the adoption of best practices consistently across the board.
• Regularly collaborate with scrum masters, and take follow-ups to drive closure of action items and implementation of improvement measures.
• Ensure scrum practices complement the other existing product development, dev ops, etc. processes in the organization. Collaborate with respective process owners for alignment.
• Collaborate with required stakeholders to ensure tool configurations (e.g., Jira workflows) are in place to support implementation of best practices.
• Run periodic agile maturity assessments. Run agile town halls to communicate with larger teams.
• Champion the use of metrics and other objective measures by the teams. Provide periodic reports to the leadership on progress against set objectives.
• Be a catalyst for change in the organization, lead without authority, and handle evolving change efforts by establishing excellent rapport with stakeholders

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a strongly associated discipline
• In-depth and practical knowledge of agile development methodologies. Experience in using Scrum, Kanban, and scaled agile framework (SAFe)
• Five or more years of experience as an agile coach/consultant
• Track record of implementing or refining agile methodologies in different work cultures and environments
• Strong leading, educating, and coaching skills
• Ability to quickly understand the context and apply big-picture thinking to achieve tangible results
• Exemplary time-management and multi-tasking skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Well-versed with collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence
• Technically savvy and completely at ease with participating in engineering-focused discussions
• Biased towards action and a profound sense of accountability and ownership

Preferred Skills & Qualifications:

• Certification as Agile coach
• Experience in coaching at large organizations
• Prior consulting experience

Additional Information

Return to Office: PubMatic employees throughout the global have returned to our offices via a hybrid work schedule (3 days “in office” and 2 days “working remotely”) that is intended to maximize collaboration, innovation, and productivity among teams and across functions. All PubMatic employees in the US and India are required to be fully vaccinated to return to our offices. Covid-19 boosters are not required at this point in time.

Benefits: Our benefits package includes the best of what leading organizations provide, such as stock options, paternity/maternity leave, healthcare insurance, broadband reimbursement. As well, when we’re back in the office, we all benefit from a kitchen loaded with healthy snacks and drinks and catered lunches and much more

Diversity and Inclusion: PubMatic is proud to be an equal opportunity employer; we don’t just value diversity, we promote and celebrate it. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.