Agile Team Coach Senior Analyst at Cigna

Purpose of the Role

• The Team Coach is responsible for enabling sustainable and predictable value delivery through Lean-Agile and Kanban ways of working. The role focuses on improving team effectiveness, optimizing flow, removing systemic impediments, fostering collaboration, and supporting continuous improvement through data-driven coaching.
• The Team Coach helps teams visualize work, manage work in progress, improve flow efficiency, establish explicit working agreements, and continuously evolve their operating model while remaining aligned with Agile Release Train (ART) objectives and organizational priorities. This role creates an environment where teams can become increasingly self-managing, adaptive, and high performing.

About the Role

• The Team Coach is a servant leader, facilitator, mentor, and Lean-Agile practitioner who partners closely with Product Owners, team members, stakeholders, Release Train Engineers, and other Team Coaches to improve delivery outcomes.
• The Team Coach supports teams in applying Lean thinking, Kanban practices, flow-based delivery, Built-In Quality, and continuous improvement techniques. The role enables transparency, collaboration, psychological safety, and continuous learning while helping teams identify and remove constraints that limit their effectiveness.

Key Responsibilities

Agile and Team Coaching

• Coach teams in Lean-Agile principles, Kanban practices, and continuous improvement.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, accountability, continuous learning, and psychological safety.
• Support teams in becoming increasingly self-managing and outcome focused.
• Facilitate healthy conflict resolution, decision-making, and strong team dynamics.
• Mentor team members and stakeholders on Agile values, principles, and flow-based ways of working.

Kanban System Management

• Support teams in designing, maintaining, and evolving effective Kanban systems.
• Facilitate visualization of work, workflows, dependencies, blockers, and demand.
• Help teams establish and manage Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits.
• Promote pull-based planning and sustainable delivery practices.
• Ensure explicit workflows are defined, understood, and continuously improved.

Flow Optimization and Delivery Excellence

• Identify bottlenecks, delays, waste, rework, aging work items, and systemic constraints.
• Drive improvement initiatives that increase flow efficiency, throughput, predictability, and customer value.
• Support teams in balancing planned and unplanned work while maintaining transparent delivery expectations.
• Facilitate discussions to optimize delivery processes and improve time-to-value.
• Partner with the Product Owner to support effective intake, prioritization, and replenishment of work.

Facilitation

• Facilitate team events and Kanban cadences including Team Syncs, Replenishment Sessions, Planning, Retrospectives, Reviews, and Improvement Workshops.
• Support participation in ART-level events including PI Planning, ART Syncs, Coach Syncs, Inspect & Adapt, and System Demos.

Metrics and Continuous Improvement

• Establish transparency through meaningful team and flow metrics.
• Use flow-based measures including throughput, cycle time, Work In Progress, aging work, blocked work, and delivery predictability.
• Enable data-driven decision making and evidence-based improvement.
• Facilitate continuous improvement experiments and evaluate outcomes.

ART and Stakeholder Alignment

• Support alignment between team objectives, ART goals, and strategic priorities.
• Facilitate management of dependencies, risks, and impediments impacting value delivery.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, Agile Product Managers, Architects, RTEs, and stakeholders.
• Escalate systemic impediments as appropriate.
• Promote transparency and effective communication across teams and stakeholders.

Success in this Role

• Teams consistently deliver value with improved predictability and flow.
• Kanban systems are transparent, actively managed, and continuously improved.
• Bottlenecks and blockers are identified and resolved quickly.
• Teams demonstrate strong self-management and ownership.
• Stakeholders have clear visibility into delivery progress, risks, and dependencies.
• Continuous improvement becomes an embedded team capability.
• ART objectives are supported through effective collaboration and alignment.

Required Qualifications, Skills & Experience

• Demonstrated experience coaching Agile teams in a Lean-Agile environment.
• Strong practical experience with Kanban and flow-based delivery practices.
• At least 4 years of experience in Team Coach/Scrum Master role.
• Experience facilitating team development and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Strong understanding of Lean principles, systems thinking, and Agile delivery.
• Experience visualizing work, managing WIP, and improving workflow efficiency.
• Experience using delivery metrics to support continuous improvement.
• Experience working within Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) environments.
• Excellent facilitation, coaching, mentoring, and conflict resolution skills.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Ability to influence without formal authority.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work effectively with cross-functional and geographically distributed teams.
• Knowledge of software delivery lifecycles, technology development practices, and DevOps concepts.

Desired Qualifications

• SAFe Scrum Master (SSM) / SAFe Advanced Scrum Master (SASM) / SAFe Practice Consultant (SPC) / Kanban Management Professional (KMP) / Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) / or equivalent Scrum or Kanban certification.
• Experience supporting product, platform, operational, or service-based delivery teams.
• Experience facilitating organizational change and Agile transformation initiatives.
• Working knowledge of Jira, Confluence, Mural, or similar collaboration tools.