So, how Agile are you? You probably take each new program or project by the horns, guiding your Agile teams through each collaborative sprint until you reach the finish line. Your efficient and value-driven approach to team coordination ensures maximum speed, results, and improvement.
But how do you present your achievements on your resume just as smoothly? How do you create a cover letter and balance your leadership and technical skills to show that you lead every sprint to success?
We’re ready to roll! Check out these three Agile program manager resume examples with time-tested advice that’s helped others in your field get a head start.
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Work History
You’ve got to have plenty of skills yourself in order to guide others through each project and smooth out collaborative projects! Show recruiters that you’re ready to help your Agile teams with just about anything by sharing everything from interpersonal skills to Jira.
Make each skill as unique to your profession as possible: Skip over generic terms like “communication” or “planning” and get way more specialized! “Weekly sprints” and “Project Calendars” sound way better, don’t they?
Don’t list your skills vaguely, either. Name things like Agile and PMO best practices, and think technically about how your soft skills apply to your specific job role.
9 most popular Agile program manager skills
- Agile
- Problem-Solving
- Project Calendars
- Project Development
- Jira
- ScrumDesk
- Kanban
- Public Speaking
- MS Teams
Sample Agile program manager work experience bullet points
Skills like those make excellent building blocks, but recruiters want to see what you’ve built! What notable projects did you coordinate between the product design and web development Agile teams? How did you execute risk mitigation under tight deadlines?
It’s important to show recruiters that you’ve left a solid, clear impact within your Agile management role. Offer up examples that are super clear in how they matter—what difference did you make with your leadership and technical abilities?
The way to answer those questions for recruiters is through metrics. Provide quantifiable data like sprint success rates, feedback percentages, and reduced labor hours to measure your impact.
Here are a few samples:
- Updated technical and business-related training content, resulting in a 21% team productivity increase
- Upgraded product roadmap features that drove $14.7M in annual revenue
- Managed a project portfolio to ensure coordination of shared resources, common activities, and other dependencies across projects, leading to revenue of $11.2M
- Led onboarding process for new clients and projects to ensure quick adaptation, improving new feature engagement rates by 31%
Top 5 Tips for Your Agile Program Manager Resume
- Depth of knowledge is key
- By the time you reach a managerial role, you’ll need to show that you’ve explored Agile methodologies, results-driven objectives, and the appropriate technical skills in depth. So be specific while addressing things like risk management and product roadmaps.
- Highlight your certifications
- If you have some impressive program manager or Agile certifications, show them off in their own section! If you have just one cert such as a PMO or CSM, you can tuck it next to your computer science degree or even include it in your skills list.
- Use your template efficiently
- Check out our three resume layouts and see which one makes your experiences and other sections look the most streamlined. You don’t want your certifications section or Agile-related skills list to look overcrowded.
- Keep things concise
- Make each experience point rich with information and eliminate filler whenever possible. Keep some brief context to paint a better picture of just how impressive that one product release was thanks to your cross-departmental sprint coordination abilities, but don’t go over 1-2 lines for each bullet point.
- Stick with one page
- Don’t go over one page for your resume. Not only will recruiters be less likely to read it, but you’ll compromise your ability to demonstrate your efficiency as an Agile program manager, too!
Alongside your polished and proofread resume, consider including a cover letter and a couple of professional references in your application package. A cover letter is expected at your level, and a few references from previous departments where you’ve excelled as a program manager will give additional credibility.
Your cover letter should complement and add to your resume without repeating information. If you had to part with any great onboarding or portfolio management stories that didn’t fit on your resume, now’s the time to bring them back!
Yep! Numbers of things, like project counts or team sizes, can seem random and leave recruiters questioning their relevance if they don’t boost your experience point’s final metric. In other words, don’t go into how many teams you managed unless that makes your productivity rates more impressive.
