Delivery Manager / Chief of Staff#
Note
This role is new, and we must define its responsibilities, metrics for success, etc more clearly. As a starting point to describe this role, below we provide the text we used in the job posting.
We’re looking for a Delivery Manager who will serve as a key facilitator in ensuring the successful and efficient delivery of our product . Acting as a servant leader, you’ll guide our engineering team, promote collaboration, and eliminate obstacles to deliver high-quality results that are aligned with our mission and goals.
In addition to your role as a Delivery Manager, we’re keen to have this person to take on responsibilities of a Chief of Staff role, organizing cross-functional work, enabling transparency in decision-making, and fostering a cohesive work environment.
We’re ideally looking for someone who has experience of leading or facilitating globally distributed and remote-first teams, asynchronous working and coaching teams in agile best practices.
What you’ll do#
As a Delivery Manager you’ll be primarily responsible for the detailed planning and day-to-day management of engineering tasks, and will also act as a servant-leader to resolve and remove any blockers that individual team members may be experiencing.
Reporting into the Engineering Manager, you’ll work closely with them on running the day-to-day delivery related tasks on their behalf. To do this you’ll be someone with extensive experience in running agile delivery processes including planning, running retrospectives, and driving continuous improvement.
You’ll collaborate with others, in particular the Product Manager, to design a process for balancing Sprint Goal work, support tasks, reactive tasks, and upstream work that is driven by open source community needs.
In addition to this primary role, you’ll take on responsibilities as the Chief of Staff, working closely with the Executive Director. In this role you’ll be responsible for organizing cross-functional work, enabling transparency in decision-making, and fostering a cohesive work environment.
About you#
You’re a Delivery Manager who understands the principles and purpose and not just the ceremonies of agile. You’ll bring experience in optimizing the delivery process, fostering collaboration and ensuring that our product priorities are delivered in the most optimal fashion, all while upholding and coaching others in the principles of agility and continuous improvement.
Essential experience#
Proficient in agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, Lean) with a deep understanding to effectively apply agile principles.
In-depth understanding and extensive experience of working with software engineers to enhance their day-to-day experience and optimize product delivery.
Strong communication skills to facilitate effective team collaboration and lead the team through various project phases.
Ability to engage and communicate with stakeholders, manage expectations, and promote alignment with goals and objectives.
Proficiency in coordinating the efforts of remote teams, ensuring efficient collaboration and productivity.
Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities to address impediments, make informed decisions, and keep work on track.
Useful qualities#
Facilitating globally distributed and remote-first teams.
Asynchronous working and associated best practices.
Creating and overseeing systems of work that organize distributed teams.
Facilitating teams who in addition to their day-to-day work actively contribute to open-source.
Working directly with Platform, DevOps or Site Reliability engineers.
Understanding the challenges of contributing to and leading community-driven open source technology projects.