50 Agile Coach Jokes for Teams That Have Been Coached

My agile coach was a developer 14 years ago. He keeps mentioning it. The last language he shipped to production was Flash.

The coach asked if we had tried a retrospective. We had just finished one. He asked if we had tried a retrospective on the retrospective.

Day rate: $3,500. Deliverable: a fishbone diagram on a whiteboard nobody photographed before the cleaners came.

He said the team was not ready for agile yet. We had been doing Scrum for nine years.

Every other sentence contains the phrase shu ha ri. We are still in shu. We have always been in shu. Shu is a country we live in now.

The coach is framework agnostic. He only recommends SAFe.

We bought a $250,000 agile transformation. We still ship once a quarter. The transformation is going great, apparently.

He said we need to install a culture of curiosity. I asked what the install command was. He scheduled a workshop.

Planning poker app, 12 engineers, one story. Results: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, coffee, infinity, and one person who picked the question mark on purpose.

Coach: let me share a metaphor. Me: please do not. Coach: imagine the team is a garden.

The certification took two days. The damage took two years.

He asked us to T-shirt size the work. The estimates came back XS, S, M, L, XL, and one item marked 1998 Hanes.

After 40 minutes of debate between a 5 and an 8, he said, let us just call it a 5. The story took six weeks.

We hired a Scrum coach, a SAFe coach, a LeSS coach, and a Scrum@Scale coach. They are now in a retrospective about why nothing ships.

Coach: we are doing the Spotify model. Me: Spotify abandoned the Spotify model. Coach: that is because they were not doing it right.

The Jira workflow redesign took three sprints. The states are now: To Do, In Progress, In Progress But Different, Blocked, Blocked But Hopeful, In Review, In Review By Someone Who Cares, and Done.

He said servant leadership means he serves the team. I asked him to write the unit tests. He said that was not the kind of serving he meant.

Coach: how did the sprint go. Me: we shipped the feature. Coach: but how did it feel.

We hired the coach to remove impediments. He has been here eight months. The biggest impediment is now on his calendar.

He runs a values workshop every quarter. The values are always the same five words on different colored post-it notes.

The same post-it notes. Every quarter. I have started recognizing the handwriting.

Coach: you are not doing it right. Me: we doubled revenue. Coach: but not in the agile way.

He told me psychological safety means anyone can speak up without fear. I told him his framework is bad. He scheduled a one-on-one with my manager.

The daily standup became a weekly. The weekly became a check-in. The check-in became an async update. The async update became a Jira ticket nobody reads. Agile.

He asked us to do a fishbone diagram. We asked what problem we were solving. He said we would find out from the diagram.

Velocity went up 40 percent. Output stayed flat. Story points got smaller. The coach called it a win.

I asked how to measure his impact. He said impact is a flow metric and we should not measure individuals. His invoice itemizes by the hour.

Coach: have you read the manifesto. Me: yes. Coach: have you read it in the original Snowbird, Utah.

He introduced a new ceremony called a pre-retrospective. It is where we plan what we will say in the retrospective.

The Definition of Done now has 14 bullet points. Item 9 is doing your taxes.

He brought in a second coach to coach the first coach. They are now coaching each other. Nothing has shipped in two months. They call it pairing.

Coach: agile is a mindset, not a methodology. Me: so why is the invoice for a methodology. Coach: that is for the workshops about the mindset.

He said failure is a learning opportunity. The transformation failed. He learned to bill another quarter.

I asked what he did before agile coaching. He said he was a project manager. I asked what changed. He said the day rate.

Coach: tell me about your team. Me: we are eight engineers shipping a checkout flow. Coach: I am hearing that you feel unheard.

We did a value stream mapping exercise. The biggest waste in the value stream was the value stream mapping exercise.

He sells a 12-week journey from doing agile to being agile. Week 13 is when you notice nothing on the roadmap moved.

I asked which framework fit us best. He said the one he was certified in last month.

Coach: let us run a premortem. Me: on what. Coach: on the premortem.

He runs an exercise where we draw the team as an animal. Last quarter we were a dolphin. This quarter we are a dolphin in transition.

I asked for a concrete recommendation. He gave me a book list. The first book is by him.

Coach: any blockers today. Me: you, mostly. Coach: I am hearing energy in the team.

After two years of transformation work, the engineering team finally pushed back. The coach said this was the breakthrough he had been waiting for and added another six months to the engagement.

His LinkedIn post about psychological safety has 1,400 likes. The same week, three engineers on the team he coaches went on stress leave.

On every Zoom call, his certification is framed on the wall behind him. The frame is bigger than the certificate.

He renamed the team leads to tribe leads, the senior engineers to chapter leads, and the lunch club to a guild. Nothing else changed.

Coach: we need to ladder this up. Me: ladder it up to what. Coach: to the ladder.

He gave a keynote about moving from projects to products. The keynote was a project. It had a fixed scope, a fixed deadline, and a status report.

Coach: let us run a discovery sprint. Me: we have been live in production for four years. Coach: then a rediscovery sprint.

He brought out the Liberating Structures cards and ran a fist-of-five vote on which card to use. The team voted one. He read it as five.