There’s a recent trend where companies are replacing their Scrum Masters with Agile Delivery Leads. This new role combines coaching, servant leadership, domain expertise and delivery accountability. But the word “delivery” can mean two very different things. How a company defines it determines the impact its new Agile Delivery Leads will have on their teams.
The main tension is whether companies end up with “Agile Delivery Leads” or more “Project Manager Delivery Leads.” One focuses on building a healthy, sustainable delivery system. The other focuses on meeting short-term project commitments.
Successful teams need both. They need to have healthy systems and the ability to meet commitments, but the current boom in “Agile Delivery Lead” job postings risks becoming a rebranding of the same low-quality “certified” Scrum Masters as before, leading companies to hire people who lean toward traditional project management and command-and-control. When leads are agile in name only, they are more likely to lead teams down a path of:
- Increased command-and-control leadership
- More micromanagement
- Optimizing for short-term deliverables
- Stripping team members of delivery accountability and autonomy
Two Types of “Delivery”
Let’s start by distinguishing two different philosophies of “delivery”:
- Delivery as a target: Hitting short-term, fixed-date, fixed-scope targets.
- Delivery as a capability: Grow a team’s ability to deliver by managing, protecting, and optimizing their environment.
| Delivery Towards a Target | Delivery as a Capability | |
|---|---|---|
| System Evolution | Technical debt accumulates to hit short-term milestones | Automated tooling, refactoring, and feedback loops are reinforced for continuous improvement |
| Ecosystem Treatment | Ecosystem is a fixed constraint; structural changes are avoided to minimize schedule risk | Ecosystem is an enabler; evolved and reshaped to remove bottlenecks and waste |
| How System Changes Happen | Top-down, driven by delivery pressure | Collaborative, open to continuous improvement, team-driven experimentation |
| Efficiency | Keeping individuals 100% busy (high utilization), pushing work | Prioritizes flow efficiency, low work-in-progress and short lead times |
| Predictability | Hitting a target date committed to months in advance, requiring late-stage heroics or quality compromises | Improving consistency and throughput, shortening lead-time tails, and utilizing data-driven forecasting |
| Response to Underperformance | Crunch time or adding more people to the project | Resolving system constraints, swarming on blockers |
| Feedback Loops | Quality and user feedback is left to the end of the cycle | Automated testing, trunk-based integration, and frequent small releases surface issues early |
Date-Driven Delivery
When meetings the delivery date is the only thing that matters, it acts as a forcing function, driving all other behaviours and decisions in a system. In this environment, Agile Delivery Leads focus on managing the gap between where teams are and where they are expected to be.
Under pressure to meet delivery commitments, teams are forced to make trade-offs: skip automated testing, ignore system bottlenecks, and work late to hit the deadlines. When the main goal is meeting deadlines, quality issues get deferred.
To hit the date, teams add extra people, work longer hours, or compromise scope. But, there’s always another target to hit. Over time, these compromises and short-term interventions compound, causing the system to drift toward lower engagement, more technical debt, and where more management intervention is needed to get anything done.
Continuous Delivery That Strengthens the System
The second interpretation of delivery is about achieving continuous positive outcomes by building a healthy system. Instead of the goal being a delivery target, it shifts to reaching the next level of team and delivery maturity. This version of delivery leadership is based on stewardship—prioritizing long-term capabilities over short-term targets.
In this way of working, effort is focused on attacking sources of waste and removing system constraints. Bottlenecks in the architecture, deployment pipelines, and missing feedback loops are exposed and resolved. Continuous delivery optimizes the entire system, prioritizing sustainable flow and improving customer value.
Delivery Stewardship
Meeting dates matters—team commitments, customer expectations, regulatory deadlines, and market windows have a real cost of missing them. But hiring the wrong kind of delivery manager or structuring the role incorrectly is the difference between seeing these challenges as a set of discrete, successive projects and seeing them as the fitness criteria for judging the effectiveness of your delivery system.
Both kinds of delivery are important. It is critical to meet business commitments and deliver to your customers on time. You cannot consistently and reliably meet those commitments without also investing in building a healthy delivery system underneath.
