Working with agents
Agents can change the amount and timing of work arriving for review. Check whether planning, review capacity and learning arrangements still fit the work.
Ask the people doing the work where it gets stuck. Look at quality, user outcomes and total effort alongside output volume before changing responsibilities or targets.
Keep time for coaching, independent practice and recovery skills. One person’s tool adoption does not determine the capability of the whole team.
Experience to discuss
Discuss examples of planning, coaching and delivery responsibility. How did the person involve the team, handle a difficult trade-off and check the effect of a change? Use agent-assisted scenarios when they are relevant to the role.
Responsibilities and skills
Purpose
Help the team use agents where they are useful, keep responsibilities clear and make time for review and learning.
Responsibilities to discuss
- Use the Maturity Model to discuss working practices and the checks they need
- Find workflow bottlenecks and give people the support and practice they need
- Define and enforce the team's operating rhythm around the Plan-Execute-Verify-Ship-Learn loop
- Review handoffs and responsibilities with the team before changing its structure
- Review user outcomes, quality and total effort alongside delivery volume
- Coach engineers on judgment, review quality and giving agents useful context
- Own execution of the adoption roadmap (Phases 1–4) for the team, with clear exit criteria per phase
- Discuss workload, concerns and learning needs with the people affected by changes
Skills for this work
These role-specific skills complement the five shared competencies. Choose examples relevant to the work and support people as they practice.
- Adoption management — Understand how the team uses agents, identify obstacles and agree useful learning or workflow changes.
- Outcome-based measurement — Choose measures that help explain user outcomes, quality and effort, and check what a change in a measure means.
- Organizational design — Review responsibilities and handoffs, and try a team arrangement when there is evidence it could help.
- Change leadership — Listen to concerns, explain the proposed change and involve people in deciding how to try it.
- Coaching for judgment — Help engineers explain their reviews, recognize limits and practice difficult decisions.
- Agentic workflow fluency — Use Plan-Execute-Verify-Ship-Learn to find where work gets stuck and agree an improvement with the team.
Compare the skills in this guide and choose an area to discuss or practice.
Signals that need more context
Use work examples alongside these signals; none is a complete measure of someone’s ability.
- Meeting facilitation without examples of helping a team make decisions
- Project-management tool expertise without evidence of leadership in practice
- Velocity tracking and capacity planning anchored in story points
- Team growth framed primarily as headcount scaling
- Performance management driven mainly by code output or merge volume
Questions to discuss
Adapt these example questions to the role and the person’s opportunities to do the work.
- Adoption equity scenario — Agent-generated changes arrive faster than the team can review them. How would you investigate the bottleneck and agree support, workload and review changes?
- Measurement design — "Design a KPI framework for a team adopting agents. What do you measure, what do you stop measuring, and why?"
- Change management — "An experienced senior engineer says 'AI is going to replace us all' and resists adoption. How do you handle it?"
- Team design — A handoff between frontend and backend teams causes repeated delays. How would you decide whether to change the workflow, responsibilities or team structure?
- Maturity assessment — Given the team’s current practices, describe the checks and capabilities it needs. Propose one improvement, its owner and a time to review it.
An example day
Illustrative scenario. Use this example to discuss how the responsibilities fit together.
An engineer says they rushed several reviews and are unsure about the results. You review an example together, arrange help with the queue and agree which checks are needed before the remaining changes are accepted.
In the team review, you compare delivery time, defects and review effort. The team chooses one change to its task briefs and pairs two colleagues to try it. You agree when to check whether it helped.
Related HELM guidance
Use the Leadership Guide to discuss responsibilities and the Adoption Roadmap to plan a small trial. The KPI Dashboard and Maturity Model are prompts for understanding the work, not scores for individuals.
Principle 6: Team-Wide Adoption Over Individual Mastery supports shared practice, clear handoffs and help for people who need it.