  It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and
advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the
agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little
research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper
examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semistructured interviews with
agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of
the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and
the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches
perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies,
knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile
coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and
persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example
companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required
organizational changes within and outside the teams.
