A host of ambitious projects and innovative products vie for the attention and resources of Digital Media’s designers, engineers, and product owners. The Agile Program Manager is an experienced Agilist with the skills to navigate complexity, negotiate up and across to clear obstacles, and take a portfolio viewpoint on competing priorities and dependencies. In addition to serving as a Scrum Master to one of Digital Media’s project teams, you will coach and manage your team of fellow Scrum Masters to achieve remarkable results on their respective teams.
- Scrum one of Digital Media’s project teams.
- Survey Digital Media’s project collaboration tools, processes, ceremonies, and artefacts, with a bias toward increasing the visibility of interdependencies and risk.
- Support Product Owners and Agile team members, especially on grooming and maintaining product and sprint backlogs.
- Serve as Agile thought leader and coach, capable of mentoring and inspiring other Scrum Masters and team members to continuously improve.
- Empower teams to self-organize and create a trusting and safe team environment that fosters open discussion and shared decision-making.
- Guide Scrum Masters to remove impediments by leveraging the appropriate resources.
- Agile fluency: You are at least a CSM (CSC is preferred). You are sensitive to the conditions that create success, can spot when teams diverge from flow, and know how to bring them back on course.
- Management skills: We will ask you to demonstrate success in coaching, mentoring, and managing Agile teams to be active participants in achieving product vision.
- Fluency in project management tools and concepts: You will take a fresh look at the tools that empower our work and the way we do it, and highlight opportunities for efficiency and improvement, especially in portfolio management.
- Leadership qualities: You’ll be expected to establish credibility and rapport up and across, as well as with technical and non-technical colleagues. You’ll lean on your facilitation, negotiation, and persuasion skills to bring others along with you.
- A natural communicator: You will be eager to share your team’s work and increase its visibility, over-communicate risks and dependencies, and both give and accept constructive feedback.
- Technical aptitude: You are at ease discussing technical concepts and have a strong digital background.
- Outcomes focus: You are flexible in your approach to Agile, willing to try new things, and just as willing to let go of what's not working or blocking results.
Agile expertise is a must, but we are also biased toward candidates with an affinity for strategic thought. Excelling in this role means helping your team trace the line of sight between their projects and the division’s strategic goals as a whole. If you believe that a successful Agile team is not just on top of the what, but the why, we want to hear from you. A grounding in Scaled Agile Framework is very helpful but not necessary.
What else?
- We’re an Agile shop grounded in Scrum + Lean, and we believe that investment in the right methods and tools, combined with attention to people and culture, is the best way to deliver great work as happily and efficiently as possible. We constantly try to improve how we do what we do.
- We are located in DC’s NoMa district in LEED Gold Certified building. We are 5 minutes to the metro and within 15 minutes of a great range of restaurants, retail, and culture (Union Station, H Street Corridor, and Union Market).
- We are diverse, lifelong learners. We read omnivorously from NPR’s giveaway bookshelf (getting hints from the NPR Books Tumblr), regularly attend Tiny Desk Concerts, and edit bad grammar on milk cartons.