Green Agile Coach
Role and purpose
The Green Agile Coach supports teams and organizations in integrating sustainability into their agile practice.
This role focuses on enabling continuous Awareness and Responsibility — the two core values of the Green Agile Guide — across all three sustainability dimensions:
- Ecological – reducing environmental impact of digital systems
- Economic – fostering long-term maintainability and mindful use of resources
- Social – protecting team wellbeing and promoting inclusive collaboration
The Green Agile Coach is not a new role, but a sharpened evolution of the agile coach or Scrum Master — with clear accountability for embedding sustainability into agile ways of working, both in day-to-day team practice and in strategic alignment with organizational goals.
Focus areas
Sustainability becomes real when it shows up in how teams plan, deliver, and collaborate. These focus areas guide the Green Agile Coach in shaping that reality.
Within the team
-
Anchor sustainability in everyday work
Introduce and reinforce sustainability thinking in retrospectives, reviews, and planning sessions
Help teams reflect on the ecological and social effects of their decisions -
Support sustainable workflows
Encourage technical practices that reduce waste and debt
Help remove blockers that hinder sustainable delivery -
Foster a healthy, inclusive team culture
Ensure psychological safety and sustainable pacing
Promote diversity and inclusive behaviors in agile collaboration
Within the organization
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Drive cultural transformation
Help the organization shift from short-term efficiency to long-term value
Raise awareness for sustainability as a competitive advantage, not a cost factor -
Connect business and sustainability
Facilitate dialogue between agile teams, leadership, and sustainability units
Translate corporate sustainability goals into actionable team-level practices -
Coach leadership and stakeholders
Support managers in making sustainable decisions
Moderate workshops and alignment sessions with a sustainability focus
Responsibilities across all dimensions
Ecological sustainability
- Promote awareness for the energy and resource use of digital products
- Encourage green coding, efficient deployments, and clean architecture
- Facilitate reflection on technical choices with environmental impact
Economic sustainability
- Support the reduction of technical debt through coaching and process design
- Encourage teams and stakeholders to balance short-term deliverables with long-term maintainability
- Highlight cost-saving opportunities through lean, resilient architecture
Social sustainability
- Ensure teams operate at a sustainable pace
- Protect teams from overload, unclear priorities, or unhealthy dynamics
- Support inclusive working models and psychological safety
Measuring impact
To support transparency and continuous improvement, the Green Agile Coach may define and track selected indicators for sustainability.
These indicators are not prescriptive — but without meaningful signals, sustainability remains invisible.
Tracking even simple metrics helps teams inspect progress and adjust course.
Here are some examples by dimension:
- Ecological
- Number of avoidable builds or deployments reduced
- Awareness for energy consumption of development or runtime environments
- Reduced carbon footprint of cloud infrastructure (in cooperation with Ops)
- Economic
- Technical debt tracked and reduced over time
- Maintainability scores or architectural metrics
- Reduction of rework or waste in the value stream
- Social
- Team satisfaction and burnout indicators
- Psychological safety ratings from retrospectives
- Participation and inclusion metrics
Final note
The Green Agile Coach is the enabler of applied sustainability in agile environments.
They ensure that values like awareness and responsibility become more than just words —
they become part of how teams think, decide, and deliver.