Agile Delivery Lead - Americas (Freelance Contract)

Agile Delivery Lead

Reports to: Global Delivery Lead

Primary Focus: Project Delivery and Team Effectiveness
Location: This is a remote position and is open to applications based within the United States (GMT-05:00)

Human Made is looking for an Agile Delivery Lead to support our Americas region on a freelance or fixed-term contract basis. The successful candidate must be able to commit to a 6 month contract.

Freelancing at Human Made

Join Human Made as a freelancer and you’ll feel like part of the team. You’ll be working on interesting and complex projects, alongside some of the industry's top talent. We’re fully remote, and have been for over 10 years, so you can expect well established ways of working, and a vibrant online culture.

Once you are booked on a project, you will integrate as part of the team, so you are expected to join team meetings and activities (although we have a strong emphasis on asynchronous communication

The Role:

As an Agile Delivery Lead,  you’ll balance project delivery with strategic team leadership, guiding distributed teams to deliver exceptional WordPress-based projects for enterprise clients

You’ll have a thorough understanding of scrum/agile concepts, ensuring that delivery processes are efficient, transparent, and continuously improving — enabling your  squad  to deliver their best. 

To do this , you’ll play a key role in client engagement, delivery planning, and cross-functional collaboration, aligning  business needs with agile principles. You’ll work closely with other discipline leads to create a  culture of trust, empowerment, and continuous improvement, aligning the squad  with Human Made’s values and helping them to monitor their performance.

You should be confident in collaborating with Engineering  and Commercial teams to ensure the smooth running of your projects and the squad. You’ll be able to anticipate and identify problems as they arise, addressing them yourself, or escalating them to the relevant discipline lead when necessary.

Applying Scrum To Produce High Quality Work

• Manage each projects scope and timeline
• Create and maintain a team culture that facilitates a shared responsibility for successful delivery
• Guide and coach team on principles and practice of the agile framework being used in the project
• Work with squad to help define and refine project scope, estimates, and resource requirements for projects
• Prepare and facilitate workshops (either virtual or in-person) to establish project needs and relationships
• Facilitate meetings to monitor project progress and resolve any issues the team may be experiencing
• Remove impediments or guide the team to remove impediments
• Assess the time and financial impact of scope change and communicate to stakeholders as appropriate
• Identify risks and mitigation strategies
• Identifies when to use experiments for learning and solutioning

Accountability To The Business

• Be commercially aware: Understand the status of the budget of your projects and be able to report on them back to the company
• Allocation management of project needs in conjunction with your squad composition

Building And Safeguarding Relationships

• Facilitate wider engagement with internal and external stakeholders, and partners engaged in delivery
• Build a partnership relationship with clients, understanding their business imperatives as context for helping align the team on those goals
• Understand the workings and needs of the account you are partnered with
• Be a leading member of the squad or team.
• Communicate regularly; be proactive in facing difficult conversations.
• Manage your interactions with clients and internal team professionally, and personably.
• Using data to allow the team and wider business to make critical decisions

Striving For Great Work

• Develop creative and technical judgement and strive for high quality output
• Share progress and communicate to internal and external stakeholders
• Conduct team reviews and retrospectives to promote continuous improvement
• Endorse and present appropriate metrics to sustain continuous improvement to get the best out of each team. Report progress, team status, and issues across the board.

• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) or Professional Scrum Master (PSM I/II) or similar qualifications desirable 
• Experience  in a scrum master / agile delivery role 
• Thrives in dynamic, multi, project environments, with the ability to adapt quickly and context switch effectively while keeping delivery goals and team alignment in focus.
• Experience applying scrum, a wider awareness of agile principles, and a data driven mindset
• Experience working in an enterprise agency environment and/or hands-on expertise with Scrum practices
• Strong skills in servant leadership, negotiation, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, and promoting transparency,  including the ability to negotiate and adapt project scope in response to change.
• A strategic and driven mindset 
• Experience in using a wide range of project management tools such as, budget/time tracking tools and issue tracking software with the depth of knowledge to recommend the right tools for a project. (e.g., Jira, Trello, Confluence, Operating )
• Strong written and oral communication and ability to communicate technical concepts
•  We work in English, so excellent written and spoken English is essential.
• Knowledge of web technologies (e.g., WordPress, PHP, HTML/HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, version control systems) and hosting/deployment best practices.

Whether you are a freelancer, or a permanent member of the team, we want all Humans to have a fantastic experience, and benefit from Human Made’s people focused approach to work.

• Gain experience working in an agency, without a long term commitment
• Competitive Rates
• Work alongside some of the WordPress industry’s top engineers
• Access to Slack channels which will open up plenty of opportunities to network with other WordPress peers at Human Made
• The opportunity to explore Human Made with the potential of becoming a full-time employee