Anko - Program Coach

Kmart Group :

Position Title : Program Coach

Line Manager's Position Title : Head of Agility Enablement Team

Function : People & Capability

New or Existing Position : Existing

Key Internal Stakeholder(s) : Functional GMs, DMs, Head of Supply Chain, Head of Merchandise and Inventory, other Technology

Date Created : 22 July 2026

Key External Stakeholder(s) : Vendors, Service Providers

Number of Direct Report(s) : 0

Number of Indirect Report(s) : 0

Required Qualification Level : Bachelor Degree (Undergrad)

Qualification Field : Scaled Agile/Business Agility

Preferred Qualification Level : Other

Qualification Field : ICAgile

Level of role : Line Manager / Professional

Years of Experience required for role : 7-10 years

Technical Skills required : Coaching, mentoring, negotiation and influencing skills commensurate with leading organisational change.

Area of Accountability : 7+ years Teaching, Facilitation, Coaching, Mentoring and navigating the ever-broadening Agile landscape.

About the Organisation :

The Kmart Group, comprising Kmart and Target, was formed as the Department Stores division in February 2016 and rebranded to the Kmart Group in November 2018. The division operates 520 stores across Australia and New Zealand and employs more than 46,000 team members.

Catch, an online marketplace, also formed part of the group in 2019. KAS Group Asia employs 700+ team members across different parts of Asia and play an active role in technology, innovation, vendor selection, price negotiations and supplier management.

Position Details : Individual contributors with responsibility in a professional or technical discipline or specialty, but may manage two or fewer employees. May direct the work of other lower level professionals or manage processes and programs. The majority of time is spent overseeing the design, implementation or delivery of processes, programs and policies using specialised knowledge and skills typically acquired through advanced education (3-4 year University degree).

Team Member Minimum Requirements : Pragmatic experience in modern day stack development (e.g. TypeScript / Node, Shift-left Security Testing, Git Actions, API / Micro Services). XP practices (TDD / BDD), refactoring patterns, automations, incremental build etc.

Primary Purpose of Role :

- Champion technical excellence and sustainable delivery across Kmart Group's strategic programs by coaching squads, line leaders and executives in Extreme Programming (XP), continuous delivery and responsible use of agentic AI.

- Enable rapid, high-quality value flow that is recognised and adopted by business users.

- Bring the best out of teams by embedding transparency on success metrics, best practices such as lean and agile, continuous improvement tools, as well as automation and waste reduction.

- Coach and mentor executives and team members across our business in the Agile ways of working, a business agility mindset - as we transform how the business works to improve quality, efficiency and digital change.

- Deep understanding of Scrum, Kanban Scrum@Scale mechanics with the ability to adopt and apply where appropriate based on context and maturity.

Traits / Abilities :

- Agentic AI / Machine learning - Data Pipelines, prompt engineering, drift/biased monitoring, MCP Servers, building custom agents

- Exceptional communication skills in connecting people to purpose and outcome, a preference to transparency and openness

- Strong interpersonal skills to convey technical detail to a broad audience and design shared safe-to-fail experiments

- Coaching, mentoring, negotiation and influencing skills commensurate with leading organisational change

- Knowledge of and ability to analyse the metrics key to measuring performance and efficiencies in delivery teams

- Ability to connect a continuous learning community across Kmart Group, and to establish and maintain a connection to the Agile community in the industry

- Strong facilitation experience in person and virtually of Agile Training, Strategic/Design Workshops Quarterly showcases to name a few

- Strong collaborative approach able to pragmatically working with others

Key Responsibilities & Deliverables :

- Get buy-in for vision and journey to transform software engineering across teams, focusing on highest value items

- Co-create and socialise a compelling technology acceleration vision & north-star architecture that aligns with corporate objectives

- Define criteria that aligns engineering health and productivity improvements to investment governance forums

- Provide transparent technology risk and opportunity insights

- Guide and build strategy for knowledge and skills capability across teams

- Create and conduct training and awareness sessions for team members and executives

- Communicate vision, roadmap and strategy for software engineering across squads

- Teams demonstrably using MVP and experimentation, with hypotheses in delivery, where appropriate

- Squads showcasing alignment to strategic technical objectives with forecasted savings

- Supported the refinement, codification and documentation for software engineering

- Produce tech-health dashboard to support priority decision making

- Create and delivered training and awareness sessions to support embedding of the XP / Agentic AI practices for squads

- Embed XP and CI/CD disciplines - pairing, TDD, trunk-based dev, automated quality gates and progressive delivery patterns

- Operationalise the flow of value by mapping and shrinking value-stream bottlenecks, championing build-measure-learn feedback loops

- Integrate business acceptance into pipelines via BDD living documentation and demo-driven backlog refinement

- Creation of a standard approach for measuring DORA metrics across all squads

- Reduction in overall cycle time in the delivery of user stories

- Increase in the deployment frequency of feature releases to production

Key Challenges of This Position :

- Architect the knowledge-capability strategy e.g. define skill matrices, career pathways and certification tracks in XP, DevOps and AI

- Launch communities of practice, guilds and technical dojos to reinforce craft and shared standards

- Deliver multi-modal training programmes (workshops, e-learning, coaching) for engineers through to executives

- Publish and curate a living Engineering Playbook that captures patterns, tools and decision records

- Erase systemic blockers at source, and track resolution time so leadership sees bottlenecks shrinking rather than re-appearing

Capability Development : The balance of fostering continuous, hands-on learning while sustaining (and visibly improving) delivery velocity lies at the heart of this role. Embedding modern day engineering practices, micro-experiments and protected capability development time directly into sprint work so capability uplift converts into shorter lead-times, higher quality and faster, evidence-backed deployments.

AI Accelerators :

- Support an AI opportunity pipeline e.g. assess feasibility/value, prioritise, and secure ethical-governance approvals

- Stand-up rapid discovery spikes & MVPs leveraging established patterns; coach squads in prompt engineering and evaluation techniques

- Define and maintain guard-rails (bias, safety, privacy, cost) and reference implementations that squads can reuse

- Establish scale-out blueprints (data pipelines, monitoring, retraining) for solutions that prove business value

- Ensure every idea is quickly triaged for business value, feasibility and ethics with clear go / no-go recommendations

- Drive pilots that deliver quantitative metrics to support decision making with standard guard-rails for bias, privacy, cost and rollback

- Mentor and upskill team members in modern day software engineering best practices

- Drive systemic impediment removal by escalating and resolving data dependencies, infrastructure and licencing constraints

- Align team health and delivery metrics with program objectives and celebrate wins across the group

Behaviour Capabilities :

- Curiosity : Applies new concepts and principles to address problems. Enjoys experimenting with test cases as a means to learn. Learns from mistakes and adjusts accordingly. Learns quickly when facing new situations.

- Builds effective teams : Participates in constructive dialogue with the team, ensuring multiple perspectives are considered. Places the team's priorities above personal objectives. Supports team decisions and promotes team spirit. Involves others appropriately when working on team projects.

- Strives for Improvement : Addresses process breakdowns with speed and thoroughness. Uses process analysis methods like metrics and benchmarks. Focuses efforts on both processes and results. Modifies own work activities and methods to eliminate wasted effort and inefficiencies.

- Inspiring Communication : Clear, concise, and professional in communication. Listens with interest to what others have to say. Shares information and updates with others as needed. Is clear and thorough in reports, documentation, and other written information.

- Collaborates : Shares information with others so there are no surprises. Involves others as appropriate to accomplish individual and group goals. Encourages unity rather than us vs. them thinking. Welcomes and acknowledges the ideas and input of others.

- Safety : Accountable for a safe site for everyone, every day by implementing and evaluating safe work practices, improving safety performance and celebrating safety achievements. Reported and identified hazards are actioned. Report site incidents.

(ref:hirist.tech)