Manager, Agile Delivery Operations

Job Description

Across our organization, we're building a workplace where collaboration is essential, diverse voices are heard, and inclusion is the key to our success. We are committed to doing the right thing in our journalism and in every role at NPR. This means that integrity, adherence to our ethical standards, and compliance with legal obligations are fundamental responsibilities for every employee at NPR.

NPR designs and delivers experiences that grow and engage NPR's audience across all of our platforms. Each month, 129 million people engage with NPR via digital platforms – via our websites, smart speakers, podcasts, mobile applications, and more. These represent the fastest-growing segments of public radio listeners. Our purpose is to identify and explore new directions for the renewal of public radio's value proposition to the next generation of our audience.

We are looking for an experienced, talented and knowledgeable Agile Delivery leader to join the Audience Engineering group responsible for innovation across NPR's audience facing digital platforms and touch points.

A day in the life -

The Agile Delivery 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, you will coach and manage your team of fellow Scrum Masters to achieve remarkable results on their respective teams.

As a Manager,
• You will lead the growth of your team members and represent your team to leadership and partner teams.
• You will use your experience to evolve our agile practice by coaching and identify opportunities for learning and improvement to strengthen our Agile teams.

As an Agile Scrum Lead,
• You will help lead cross-team Agile coordination, planning, and operations.
• You will facilitate planning, daily progress, retrospectives, and other Agile ceremonies, assist Product, Design, and Technical team members to translate their vision into reality.
• You know how to get results and do whatever it takes to clear impediments and communicate risks, progress, success, and opportunities to your team and management.

While we invite a range of backgrounds, we have a few prerequisites -
• Agile fluency: While we adapt processes to meet our needs, you are at least a Certified Scrum Master or SAFe® Release Train Engineer . 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. You coach and partner with teams to lead the evolution of our Agile practice. You have worked in a multi-team Agile environment.
• Management skills: We will ask you to demonstrate success in coaching, mentoring, and managing Agile teams and Scrum Masters 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 and release / increment planning.
• 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.

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.
• Vigor and passion - for leading teams to build solutions that push the limits of technology incorporating industry practices and innovations
• Love of -- bordering on obsession with -- Agile culture.

What else?
• In this Hybrid Permitted role, the ideal candidate is expected to work on-site at NPR's DC office facility approximately 2-3 days per workweek.
• 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).

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-rjx37e-18-224-0-25-42 in your application.