What are the Most Important Agile Coach Traits?

Are you planning to hire an Agile Coach to support your Transformation? Learn the 10 most important Agile Coach traits that make an agile coach effective.

Anthony Mersino
Leadership and Agility
5 min readFeb 28, 2024

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What are the top Agile Coach traits that great coaches should have? Today there are more and more individuals hanging out a shingle and calling themselves Agile Coaches.

With good reason — Indeed.com listed Agile Coach as #18 on their list of top jobs in 2019. At $161K average salary, it was the highest paid of the best jobs listed.

Unfortunately, there are very few standards, certifications or training programs directed at Agile Coaches. So how do you know what agile coach traits are necessary or desirable? When evaluating a coach, what information should you look for or ask about? The infographic above and the text below is my attempt to explain that.

A Disclaimer On Agile Coach Traits

I think it is important to point out that each coaching situation is somewhat unique and there may not be one definitive set of “best” or ideal agile coach traits.

Much of my experience has focused on early stages of agile adoption, when organizations are first moving from waterfall or predictive approaches to using the Scrum Framework.

The specific skills needed to adopt the Scrum Framework will be different than those required for Kanban or Extreme Programming.

Traits that an Agile Coach Needs to Support an Agile Transformation

Below is my list of traits that I think Agile Coaches should have to support an Agile Transformation using the Scrum Framework. This is my list of the to 10 traits, in no particular order:

1. Hands-On Scrum and Agile Experience

I think it goes without saying that to be a good coach you need hands-on experience with Agile and Scrum. The most effective coaches will have worked within a Scrum Team as a Dev Team member, developing solutions. A huge plus would be having Scrum Master and Product Owner experience.

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