Agile Coaching in a Fully Remote World
For Alia Rose Connor, an Agile Coach Manager at Spotify's New York office, the job has always been about close collaboration. These days, though, that collaboration happens from 150km away: Connor is working from her house in the Hudson Valley near New Paltz instead of her usual Brooklyn apartment.
"When we bought this house last September, we had no idea what a refuge it would turn out to be," she says. The move to fully distributed work has changed her daily rhythm, replacing a 45-minute commute with morning yoga and shifting all of her interactions online.
What an Agile Coach Manager Does
Connor works with fellow coaches to help teams improve how they deliver value. The work spans a wide range: coaching individual teams on collaboration, refining process and planning, road-mapping, or facilitating working agreements and mutual expectations among team members.
Recently, a significant focus has been helping teams strengthen asynchronous communication so they can operate effectively while remote. Her team also works at the leadership level, helping leaders communicate, strategize, and road-map, and ensuring the right tools and processes support a short feedback cycle for learning and improvement.
The biggest challenge of the current setup is that collaboration is the core of her job. "The way I do my job well is by being in tight communication with many other people across the company," she explains. With everything distributed, she's in Hangout meetings for most of the day. To cope, she makes a point of taking breaks, finishing meetings a few minutes early to stretch or get fresh air, and blocks at least half an hour for lunch to recover from a morning of back-to-back calls.
A Typical Day's Structure
Mornings are largely taken up with one-to-ones with her team members. The afternoon shifts to broader gatherings like all-hands and tech leadership meetings. When she's lucky, she gets focus time later in the day to advance longer-term initiatives.
One current project is developing a career development framework specifically for coaches. Traditionally, coaches at the company have used the same framework as engineers, despite the differences in their work. Connor and a colleague are working through how to articulate the accountabilities for a coach, define where coaches should have impact, and identify what genuinely solid impact looks like.
Another project involves a newly formed team created from three combined product areas. The work entails figuring out which forums and rituals make sense for team members and helping them forge a shared group identity. Connor notes that coaches always aim for sustainable improvement — even while solving immediate problems, the goal is to help teams put systems in place (or remove obstacles) to work more effectively in the future.
That mindset is one reason she values her employer. "I don't know any other company where that mindset is quite so ingrained," she says. "Everything we do here isn't seen as a final version – it's a step along the way to learning more and working better."
Ending the Workday
With remote work, meetings wrap up a bit earlier these days. Connor spends about an extra half hour reviewing her action items for the day before stepping outside. Being in the Hudson Valley means she can watch spring arrive in the garden — kale, beets, broccoli, and carrots are coming up — and she takes walks in the woods with her partner. They're even cutting a trail on the property to make it more accessible for friends and family once visits are possible again.
Meals have adjusted too: the couple cooks double portions of dinner so leftovers serve as lunch the next day, a routine that simplifies the remote-work schedule.
