NPR is assembling a rotating team dedicated to tackling the questions that will shape public radio’s future. This team will conduct research, ask questions, and rapidly prototype and test ideas that will help to ensure public radio’s long-term sustainability.
As scrum master, you provide day-to-day guidance and coaching to a cross-functional team dedicated to tackling public radio’s most interesting and urgent questions. You are passionate about Agile methodology, comfortable in a servant-leader role, and balance your talent for building consensus with a canny ability to prioritize and drive toward outcomes. You will facilitate planning, daily progress, retrospectives, and other Agile ceremonies, assist Product Owners to translate their vision and business objectives into backlogs, and empower your team’s progress. You know how to get results and do whatever it takes to clear impediments and communicate risks to your team and management. This is a temporary one-year contract with NPR.
While we invite a range of backgrounds, we have a few prerequisites:
- Innovation focus: You get excited about projects that break the mold, reimagine the future, and reject the premise. You are never afraid to ask, “what if?”
- Agile fluency: You are a Certified Scrum Master and have worked on Agile teams in past roles. 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.
- Leadership qualities: You’ll be expected to establish credibility and rapport up and across, as well as with technical and non-technical colleagues.
- Proactive approach: You don’t wait around. If there’s an issue, you’re usually the first to flag it. If your team is stumped and you don’t have the answer yourself, you know how to get it.
- 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.
The best candidates share these traits with our team:
- Honesty, a friendly attitude, a good sense of humor, and a voracious hunger to learn and improve.
- Creativity, curiosity, and flexibility -- tempered by pragmatism, patience, and acute attention to detail.
- Love of -- bordering on obsession with -- Agile culture.
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.