The Company

Blexr is an affiliate marketing company which has a remote-first working policy, with most of our Blexrians operating from sunny Malta. Our vision is to empower better online decision-making for our users. We do this by creating industry-leading products based on honesty, integrity, and transparency. By putting our people first, we know they will do the same for our users.

The position summary

You are a keen Agile practitioner with a passion for guiding groups of individuals towards becoming great teams. You will help us create a learning organization and a great workplace culture that provides room for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. From product discovery to delivery to marketing, you will have an impact in each area, facilitating our user-centric approach and evolution through innovation. You will know the difference between ‘doing’ and ‘being’ agile, and that your role is to be an agent of change, rather than a drill sergeant.

Our cross-functional teams consist of SEO Analysts, Content Specialists, UX/UI Specialists, Software Developers, QA Engineers, and dedicated Account Managers. You will lead such a team to perform to their best and be effective, fostering best practices across the different disciplines within the team, relentless improvement to deliver better and faster, and ultimately delight our users. In short, you will get stuff delivered, and you are more concerned with process results than process enforcement.

The candidate we’re looking for will be able to understand and apply our core company values of trust, transparency, accountability, and growth mindset. This is a remote position. We are on the hunt for candidates located in time zones between UTC-1 and UTC+5.

Responsibilities:

• Ensures vision, mission, and objectives are understood by everyone on the team.
• Fosters a culture of ownership and self-organization within the team. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) define the destination for each quarter – it is up to the team, facilitated by the Scrum Master, to chart their path to that destination.
• Supports and facilitates the team to practice dual-track agile – product discovery and product delivery – encouraging the early involvement of team members in the process of product discovery (such as in user interviews or running experiments) and building a validated product backlog.
• Coordinates and facilitates key team meetings including product discovery sessions, sprint planning, DSUs, sprint retros, and OKR check-ins. Ensures meetings are effective and that they yield the expected value, rather than just going through the motions.
• Supports the product owner in (i) building a high-value product backlog, ensuring that the product backlog refinement process is well understood by both PO and team, and facilitating effective collaboration between the PO and the team; (ii) processing inputs and managing the size of the product backlog; and (iii) defining the scope of an upcoming sprint by identifying and prioritizing the most valuable items in the product backlog.
• Dedicated to the team’s speed of delivery, driving removal of impediments which slow it down – across all functions within the team, ranging from Dev and QA to Design, Content or SEO – while understanding the importance of not necessarily removing such impediments on behalf of the team.
• Helps the team implement best practices and relentlessly improve on them – again, across all functions within the team – be it best agile practices, best engineering practices such as test automation, or best SEO practices such as optimized page load speed and good use of hreflang tags.
• Motivates and encourages the team to have effective retrospectives, ensuring that retros are a safe space rather than a forum for playing the blame game, and utilizing different retro formats to maintain interest. Ensures action items arising from retros are appropriately followed up to closure.
• Holds regular team health check-ins.
• Tracks and reports key metrics for the team, leverage them with the team to hold themselves accountable for their results, and initiates concrete action based on them.
• Recognizes that different stages of an agile team’s development require different approaches: some, teaching; some, coaching; and some, mentoring.
• Takes appropriate and effective action to address counterproductive behaviors from any team member.
• Pushes the boundaries beyond a particular flavor of agile – be it Scrum, Kanban, ScrumBan, or other – guiding the team through their journey of experimentation towards what works best for them to achieve their goals. We are framework agnostic.
• Drives forward initiatives, as requested by company leadership, aimed among others at promoting and facilitating the achievement of OKRs, as well as enhancing communication and transparency.

Knowledge, Skills & Experience:

• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.
• Well organized with superb attention to detail.
• Passion and enthusiasm to innovate, iterate, and be an agent of change in an incredibly fast-paced industry.
• Team leadership skills that focus on inspiration and influence.
• Must have 2+ years of experience as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.
• Experience working in a digital marketing environment, coupled with a solid understanding of the software development lifecycle and good engineering practices, would be ideal.
• Comfortable working with a distributed team.
• Curious, well-read in Agile and a range of associated topics including modern product management, and keeps abreast of new and emerging methods.
• Able to use a prescribed framework or method (Scrum or Kanban) and apply all its elements – even though it might not be applied in its canonical form at Blexr.
• Appreciates the differences between a working group and a team, different models for team formation and development, and the key attributes of an effective agile team.
• Understands the role of listening in facilitation and can effectively apply basic facilitative listening techniques; understands the process of divergent thinking, the groan zone, convergent thinking, and closure
• Applies techniques such as powerful questions to foster self-organization. Able to drive the in-depth evaluation of impediments using appropriate techniques.
• Jira competency beyond work item workflow, including the ability to generate and interpret reports, and at least a basic knowledge of JQL.
• Knowledge of or experience with any of the following would be an asset: the performance/affiliate marketing business model, the OKRs framework, Dual Track Agile with Product Discovery and Product Delivery.
• Embody our core values of trust, transparency, accountability, and growth mindset. These values are at the heart of everything we do, are vital for all roles throughout Blexr, and applicants must be able to show how they have demonstrated at least some of these attributes in previous employment.
• The candidate must embrace and promote Blexr’s core values of trust, transparency, accountability, and growth mindset.