Agile philosophy and coaching mindset
"What is the difference between coaching, mentoring, facilitating, and training?" Coaching: asking powerful questions to help the coachee find their own answers — used when the person has capability and needs to unlock it. Mentoring: sharing your experience to help the mentee learn from it. Facilitating: creating conditions for a group to achieve an outcome — retrospectives, workshops. Training: delivering knowledge or skills instruction. An Agile coach moves fluidly between modes. The mistake most coaches make is defaulting to training when coaching would be more lasting. "What does a team need from an Agile Coach versus a Scrum Master?" Scrum Master: focused on one team, supports Scrum process, removes impediments, protects the team. Agile Coach: works across teams and the organisation, addresses systemic impediments, coaches leadership, drives cultural and structural change. Agile coaching without organisational change typically fails because team-level agility is constrained by the system the teams operate in.
Agile transformation questions
"Tell me about an Agile transformation you were involved in — what worked and what would you do differently?" Starting state, your approach, what worked (specific changes, measured improvements — cycle time, deployment frequency, team satisfaction), what did not, what you would do differently. Genuine reflection is more credible than a perfect story. "How do you handle resistance to Agile from senior leadership?" Root cause first: loss of control, fear, misunderstanding, or past failed transformations? Find genuine business problems Agile would solve, demonstrate with a small pilot rather than arguing from principles, create psychological safety for leaders to voice concerns.
Facilitation and ceremony questions
"How do you run a retrospective that produces real change?" Design for actionability: psychological safety, format that generates insight (Start/Stop/Continue, Timeline, Sailboat), limit actions to what the team will actually commit to (one to three beats ten that disappear), assign owners and dates, open next retro by reviewing last retro's actions. "What do you do if a sprint review has no real stakeholder input?" A demo without genuine feedback is not a sprint review. Understand why stakeholders are not attending, make the review genuinely useful to them, restructure to show business outcome not just completed work, consider shorter more frequent touchpoints if the full ceremony is not viable.
Metrics and measurement questions
"How do you measure whether Agile is working?" Beyond velocity: delivery outcomes (cycle time, deployment frequency, lead time, mean time to restore — DORA metrics), business outcomes (time to market, customer satisfaction, release success rate), team health (psychological safety, retrospective action completion). Avoid measuring ceremony adherence or process compliance — these measure form not substance. Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.