Software today is built by teams. There may be brilliant individuals and genius coders but in my experience the best designs come from a process of collaboration, iteration and feedback. Across an organization of many teams working on the same codebase you need some consistency in approach and a common language for talking about design and improvements. Building team skill is an important consideration for agile leaders which often receives too little attention. Experienced software developers often work well with peers, but they also need to be able to share what they know and help the more junior people in their team to advance. Of course it’s always been part of a Scrum Master or Agile Coach role to encourage better teamwork and collaboration, but Technical coaching adds another dimension. The focus is not so much on the process and ceremonies of an agile method, but more about how the code is getting written. It’s about raising code quality, learning faster, and better handling the complexity of modern software development. A technical coach works with teams of developers, generally in larger organizations. It can be a full-time role, or a part of the work of tech leads and staff engineers. The focus of this work is to influence coding decisions, spread skills in teams and help people gain a better vocabulary for discussing design decisions. In this talk I’d like to explain what a technical coach actually does and how a technical coaching program can help an organization to build a strong engineering culture and promote technical excellence. Livestreamed Manchester to Dallas