It is the fate of an Agile Coach who does their work right that, over time, they make themselves redundant. Like Nanny McPhee, you show up when you are needed most, and you leave once the need is gone.
That is the plainest way I can explain why I am leaving railcube at the end of this summer to join Prowareness as a Senior Implementation Consultant. No crisis, no grievance, no feeling I could not name. The next logical step. The work I came to do had come to completion, and a coach who has done their job is supposed to feel the ground shift under them. And I felt that. What is left is grief and pride in roughly equal measure, which is, I am told, exactly how this is meant to feel.
Before I say a word about where I am going, I want to be honest about where I have been, and about why I do this work at all.
Why I do my work
I have been in software since I left uni. There is real beauty in designing, building, and testing software. But software is fleeting. Code grows old. It becomes technical debt. Ambitious new colleagues rewrite it. Projects I once poured myself into have long since gone offline. That one Flash banner campaign rusts on a back-up drive. That other corporate website has been renewed twice over. That one Nintendo Wii game I helped build is, somewhere, collecting dust.
What endures past the software is what makes the software possible: the organization, and the people inside it. Somewhere along the way that became the whole point for me. Not the deliverable, but the team that learns to deliver. Not the release, but the people who grow up around it and outlast it. That is the work I do now. I build the conditions and I grow the people and the process. I am structural and developmental, not executional. I made that conscious step when I left project management behind in 2022.
What I am proud of
For almost four years I was the only Scrum Master, and later the only Agile Coach, in a company building software for the international rail freight sector. Seven distributed teams across the world. Two of those years at the management table, watching the machine from the inside.
Together we professionalized the hell out of that company. How it communicates, builds, refines, scales, delivers, documents, and releases. I know my part in that, and I take no individual credit for it, because it was not an individual achievement. It was collective patience and tenacity, the unglamorous kind, the kind that compounds quietly until one day the room is simply better than it was and nobody can point to the moment it changed.
That is the work I am proudest of. Not a thing I shipped. A cumulative set of improvements on the way of working I helped an organization grow into.
Why leave a place you love
It is a fact about growth, and about me; I am not finished. I do not think I ever will be, and I do not treat that as a flaw. It is my engine. My successes as an Agile Coach at railcube did not make me feel done. They made me hungry for the next thing, and clear-eyed that I could not get it where I was.
So I want what railcube, through no fault of its own, could not give me anymore. A portfolio across many organizations rather than one. Colleagues who are coaches too, who sharpen me by disagreeing with me, after years of being the only one of my kind in the building. Room to develop the Hostcraft discipline I have been building in public, and a stage to one day stand on and talk about it. The experience, the growth, the peers. To be deep in the fire with people who are shaping the future of Agile, because this is an exhilarating age to be doing it and I do not want to watch it from the sideline.
None of that arrives by staying comfortable. Growth rarely sends an invitation that says this will be easy. It sends one that says this will stretch you, and the only honest answer is to walk toward it.
I will miss the people. The colleagues who became something closer to friends. The leaders who trusted me with a mandate and grew alongside me. The engineers who put up with my silly interventions and gave me one hell of a ride.
That is what makes this bittersweet rather than simply sweet. I am walking toward a great deal of good. I am also walking away from people I love. Both things are true.
The leaf
Those who know me know I make a killer limoncello. I use these amazing Italian lemons, that I import from the Amalfi coast. And though I only use the zest, I hate to let the rest of the lemons go to waste. With the seeds I started growing my own plants, to one day plant trees in a sunny garden. This hot summer, these plants are growing fast, growing new leaves. Old ones slowly turn and fade.
A new leaf is a strange image when you sit with it. We use it to mean a clean page, a fresh start. But a leaf does not turn over to erase what came before. It turns because the season changed, and the thing it is attached to is still growing, still reaching for more light than it could get where it was.
So I am not closing a chapter on railcube. I am carrying it. The teams I helped find their footing, the line I found between what lasts and what does not. All of it comes with me, the same way every good host carries the last room they were in into the next one they walk into.
To the people I am leaving: thank you for being the part that was always hard to leave.
And to whoever is reading this from the edge of their own comfortable thing, sensing it might be time and not yet sure: the discomfort of having outgrown something you are still grateful for is not a problem to be solved. It is information. Do with it what you will.