What are the responsibilities and job description for the Principal Kanban Master position at Idexcel?
Job Title: Principal Kanban Master - Team Coach
Location: Remote - Quarterly client visits at Washington DC for PI Planning Events
Duration: 16 Months
Summary of Duties
The SAFe Kanban Master/Team Coach (KM/TC) is a servant leader and coach. The ideal candidate will work at the team level to ensure the successful implementation of lean-agile values, principles, and team practices while fostering a culture of kaizen, continuous improvement, and flow within a SAFe 6 Agile Release Train (ART).
Essential Functions
Coach self-organization, cross functionality, and coordination of effective ART events
Strong passion for Kanban and SAFe frameworks guiding development teams to higher team maturity through relentless improvement practices and principles.
Support the team with empathy by displaying an authentic understanding and concern for a team member’s beliefs or feelings. In turn, the team is more likely to build relationships with others, resulting in higher levels of collaboration and performance.
Persuades rather than use authority as servant leaders, KM/TCs focus on the needs of team members and those they serve, intending to achieve results aligned with the organization’s values, principles, and business objectives.
Conflict navigator – Supports team members in resolving interpersonal conflicts, problem-solving, and decision-making.
Mentor – Supports the personal development of team members, helping them gain a continuous learning mindset. They guide the team to find solutions to their problems independently instead of being given the answers.
Help the team provide transparency by ensuring artifacts are inspected, identifying significant differences between expected and actual results, and detecting anti-patterns.
Kanban Knowledge and Experience
Highly experienced with the practices and principles of Kanban and able to explain the differences between Kanban, Scrum, and SAFe.
Facilitate the adoption and effective use of Kanban principles, practices, and techniques at the team level.
Facilitate effective SAFe Kanban team events, including stand-ups, backlog refinement/ queue replenishment and kaizen/retrospectives focused on flow improvement
Good knowledge of Kanban techniques and SAFe 6 practices including, but not limited to definition of done, user story refinement, automated testing, backlog refinement and replenishment, PI Planning,
Collaborate with team members, Release Train Engineer, product owner, and product manager to establish and maintain Kanban boards, Work In Progress (WIP) limits, pull policies/agreements and classes of service.
Coach bottleneck identification and flow efficiency strategies.
Educate team members on key Kanban metrics (e.g., cycle time, lead time, throughput, CFD) and use them to drive data-informed decision-making
SAFe 6 Knowledge and Experience
Participate in the ART Events with the team, ART Syncs, PO Syns, Coaching Syncs, Inspect and Adapt helping the team identify kaizen opportunities across the team/ART
Foster alignment between team-level Kanban practices and PI level objectives within
Act as a change agent to promote SAFe 6 Lean-Agile principles and values, ensuring a focus on delivering customer value.
Guide the team in identifying and addressing bottlenecks, dependencies, and risks. Support the team in building a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
Collaborate with PO, RTEs, PMs, and other stakeholders to share SAFe 6 and Kanban best practices and remove team systemic impediments.
Minimum Qualifications
Typically, a minimum of 8 years as an agile Kanban teams and a bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of related work experience and schooling in lieu of degree; Advanced degree and 5 years related work experience.
Proven experience as a team Kanban Coach in a SAFe 6 environment
Demonstrated understanding of Kanban, Scrum, agile methodologies and SAFe
Ability to prioritize and make data-driven decisions
Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
Experience with Jira Software, Confluence, LucidCharts, Jira Align, Agility Health.
Minimum Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
Valid Active Certification in Kanban (e.g., KSD, TKP or equivalent)
Valid/Active SAFe Scrum Master (SSM 6)
Strong analytical skills and experience in Kanban and data-driven coaching
Background in coaching teams transitioning from Scrum to Kanban
Communications and Interpersonal Skills
Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to influence and coach at team level. Must have excellent oral and written communication and presentation skills.
Demonstrated ability to foster collaboration, transparency, and trust within and across teams.
