ROLE OVERVIEW
This role is responsible for improving the organisation’s ability to deliver high-quality software products quickly and consistently. Working across cross-functional product squads, the Delivery Coach partners with Product Managers, Engineering Leads, System Analysts, Quality Assurance Engineers and Developers to improve delivery effectiveness, remove bottlenecks, embed best practices and build a culture of continuous improvement.
Product Managers remain accountable for product priorities, customer outcomes and roadmap decisions, while Engineering Leads remain accountable for technical delivery, engineering standards and people leadership. The Delivery Coach enables both roles by improving the delivery system, strengthening team practices and helping remove impediments.
The Delivery Coach improves the end-to-end product delivery system, rather than managing ceremonies or sprint administration. The role also focuses on coaching, capability building, organisational effectiveness and data-driven decision-making.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Delivery Excellence
- Coach product squads to improve delivery speed, predictability and quality.
- Identify and remove systemic bottlenecks affecting product delivery.
- Improve team flow by reducing handoffs, delays and unnecessary overhead.
- Drive continuous improvement across the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
- Promote lean product development and agile delivery principles.
Coaching & Capability Building
- Coach Product Managers, Engineering Leads, System Analysts and Quality Assurance Engineers to build delivery capability.
- Facilitate constructive discussions that enable teams to solve problems collaboratively.
- Develop high-performing cross-functional product squads.
- Mentor delivery leaders in servant leadership and continuous improvement practices.
- Promote a culture of accountability, ownership and learning.
Agile Ways of Working
- Continuously evaluate and improve delivery practices rather than enforcing rigid frameworks.
- Guide teams in adapting Agile practices to their product, customer and organisational context.
- Facilitate retrospectives and improvement workshops where required.
- Share best practices across product squads.
Delivery Metrics & Performance
- Establish and monitor delivery metrics including:
- Lead and Cycle Times
- Deployment Frequency
- Escaped Defects
- Change Failure Rate
- Team Throughput
- Work in Progress
- Use data to identify trends and recommend improvement initiatives.
Cross Functional Collaboration
- Improve collaboration between Product, Engineering, Quality Assurance, Architecture and Operations.
- Clarify delivery responsibilities with Product Managers and Engineering Leads to avoid overlap in product prioritisation, technical ownership and people management.
- Facilitate dependency management across multiple product squads.
- Support planning for large cross-functional initiatives.
- Align senior stakeholders and business owners on delivery priorities, dependencies and improvement actions.
- Communicate delivery risks, constraints and trade-offs to product, technology and business stakeholders.
- Escalate systemic impediments and facilitate leadership decisions to improve cross-team delivery.
AI-Enabled Product Delivery
- Champion the practical adoption of AI tools across the SDLC.
- Coach teams to integrate AI into requirements analysis, coding, testing, documentation and delivery workflows.
- Encourage the sharing of reusable AI prompts, workflows and best practices.
- Measure productivity improvements from responsible AI adoption.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE SUCCESSFUL
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology or a related discipline.
- Agile certification (e.g. Certified ScrumMaster, Professional Scrum Master, SAFe, ICAgile) is desirable but not mandatory.
- Coaching certification is advantageous.
Work Experience
- 8+ years of experience in software product delivery.
- 3+ years of coaching Agile product teams or leading delivery improvement initiatives.
- Experience working in cross-functional product organisations.
Knowledge, Skills & Experience
- Strong knowledge and application of:
- Agile product development.
- Lean product development.
- Scrum, Kanban and flow-based delivery.
- Modern SDLC practices.
- CI/CD pipelines.
- DevOps principles.
- Test automation.
- Cloud-native software delivery.
- Product discovery and product lifecycle management.
- Software architecture fundamentals.
- Delivery metrics and engineering performance measurement.
- AI-assisted software development tools and practices.
- Demonstrated success in improving delivery speed, software quality and organisational effectiveness.
- Experience working with modern software engineering practices including CI/CD and DevOps.
- Experience implementing or scaling Agile delivery practices across multiple teams.
- Experience supporting AI adoption in software development is desirable.
- Bilingual in English and Bahasa Malaysia.