Value Stream Coach (Agile, Scrum)

Role Overview

As a Value Stream Coach within Guardian Life’s Digital & Technology organization, you will help teams optimize workflows to deliver maximum value. You will coach individuals and teams on dependency management, delivery best practices, and alignment to outcomes, partnering closely with Value Stream, Product, and Technology leaders.

Responsibilities

Facilitate Value Stream Events

• Lead and facilitate value stream events such as PI Planning and Value Stream Syncs
• Drive continuous exploration and backlog refinement ahead of PI Planning
• Ensure alignment and transparency across teams and stakeholders

Coach Teams and Leaders

• Coach teams/leadership to deliver end-to-end value with a focus on customer outcomes
• Help design effective value stream structures and collaborative practices to:
  • minimize hand-offs
  • clarify product ownership
  • define team outcomes
• Support business process improvements to enhance operational efficiency
• Coach Value Stream leadership, Product Managers (PDMs), Product Owners (POs), and team coaches on agile skills, mindset shifts, and product-platform principles
• Role model coaching practices and support team coaches in using digital tools and data for transparency and performance improvement

Champion OKRs and Strategic Alignment

• Promote Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to align efforts to value stream goals and measure performance
• Ensure OKRs cascade from value stream to team level
• Connect strategy, portfolio investments, and execution to business priorities and outcomes
• Support portfolio planning and demand management
• Facilitate dependency management and stakeholder engagement to reduce delivery risks

Contribute to the Center of Excellence (CoE)

• Participate in Communities of Practice and mentor Value Stream Team Coaches
• Help define, adopt, and evolve standards and practices based on shared feedback

Own Tooling Standards and Governance

• Define and maintain tooling standards across key platforms (e.g., Jira, Confluence, SPM)
• Ensure consistent usage aligned to best practices across teams and value streams

Promote Flow and Engineering Practices

• Identify and address bottlenecks, dependencies, and waste to improve flow and delivery speed
• Partner with engineering leaders to champion modern software development practices, including:
  • building automation
  • deployment automation
  • unit test coverage
  • shift-left testing
• Promote practices such as CI/CD and unit testing in partnership with engineering/technology leaders

Requirements

• 8–10 years of experience in roles such as Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer, or Agile Coach
• Expertise with product platform model constructs with a value stream orientation (preferred)
• Deep understanding of Agile methodologies and lean principles applied at scale
• Ability to identify and help remove impediments to flow and progress
• Proficiency using data to drive transparency and continuous improvement (text cut off)

Nice-to-have / Preferred Signals

• Experience as a Value Stream Coach or similar transformation/scale agile coaching role
• Strong knowledge of dependency management and enterprise-level delivery planning
• Experience governing tooling standards across teams (Jira/Confluence/SPM)