Agile coaches often get caught up in the excitement of solving the next big problem or frustration when things don’t match their ideals. I’ve been there myself. Early in my career, I relied heavily on intuition, and was impulsive until I learned how to observe more deliberately through Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, and Jerry Weinberg’s PSL-training. My coaching practice transformed further when I got my ICF-ACC and started using a coach log—a tool I now rely on to track my interventions and stay intentional in my approach.
In product development, teams are encouraged to follow a roadmap aligned with their long-term strategy. Agile coaches can gain a lot from thinking similarly, and that’s where a coach log comes into play.
The Coach Log
A coach log is a tool that builds deliberateness into your coaching, helping you track conversations, reflect on progress, generate immediate results if necessary, or foster sustainable growth within teams.
At its core, a coach log is about turning random acts of coaching into deliberate, well-thought-out practices. It provides a structure that allows you to:
- Track your conversations and interventions.
- Reflect on what worked and what didn’t.
- Align your coaching with long-term team growth.
Without this structure, coaching becomes impulsive and reactive. You find yourself jumping from one issue to another without a clear direction or overarching goal. Actions become disconnected and overwhelming. The log helps you see the bigger picture, ensuring your coaching is not just a series of one-off solutions but a coherent, cumulative effort aimed at long-term improvement.
Domain Knowledge: The Coach Log Is NOT a Substitute for Expertise
While the coach log helps you become more deliberate and reflective in your practice, it’s important to remember that domain knowledge remains essential. Coaching agile teams requires a deep understanding of business development, company financials, product development, software engineering, team dynamics, and the specific challenges that arise in these areas.
The coach log is not a substitute for that expertise—it’s a tool to enhance how you apply that knowledge. Your interventions will be most effective when they are informed by your domain knowledge. The log simply allows you to track and reflect on how you’re using your expertise to support teams, ensuring that your coaching is intentional and grounded in both experience and understanding.
The Coach Log as an Entropy-Countermeasure
In part, coaching aims to reduce entropy that creeps into teams over time—whether it’s disorganized processes, misaligned goals, or fragmented collaboration. Without deliberate interventions, teams tend to drift towards stable disorganization. And in that sense, the coach log becomes a kind of meta tool—an entropy-countermeasure for the coaching process itself. By tracking interventions, reflections, and progress, the log ensures that your coaching doesn’t fall into randomness or impulsiveness. Instead, it helps you maintain structure and direction, ensuring that your efforts to reduce entropy within teams are themselves deliberate and intentional.
What Goes Into a Coach Log?
To start using a coach log effectively, here’s a practical framework for what to capture:
- Date
- Length
- Session Type: Are you meeting with individuals, the team, stakeholders, or observing team performance?
- Session Goal(s): What do you want to achieve during this session? Be clear and specific. Identify the challenges or behaviors you’re aiming to address.
- Observations/Insights: What stood out during the session? These could be reflections on team dynamics, individual behaviors, or overall progress.
- Models introduced: Did you introduce any models or frameworks? Which ones?
- Interventions: What actions did you take? This could include introducing new methods, asking key questions, or facilitating exercises.
- Meta-reflections: Assess the effectiveness of your interventions. Did they have the desired impact? What might need adjustment moving forward?
- Next Steps: Identify where your focus should be next. How can you build on what was done in this session?
For those familiar with the Consulting Grid developed by David L. Champion, G. Clinton Kiel, and John McLendon, you could also add a column for what stance you took in that session. Over time, this can enable you to identify blind spots in your consulting.
Misaligned Product Strategy and Technical Architecture: Team Aurora
To illustrate how a coach log can work in practice, let me share an example from a team I worked with, Team Aurora. This nine-member product team had recently faced turnover, and their architectural challenges weren’t aligning well with their product strategy. They also struggled with “sticky” subgroups, making collaboration across disciplines difficult.
Using a coach log, I was able to track interventions and systematically address these collaboration and technical misalignments.
Screenshot of the coach-log. You can see a limited, highly modified version of the coach-log here.
The many values of a coach-log
The value of a coach log is not just in staying on track. It’s also about creating space for deeper personal reflection, giving you the opportunity to identify blind spots, challenge your own assumptions, and generate insights about systemic patterns.
By documenting your interventions and progress, the log encourages you to slow down, listen more closely, and revisit your interpretations of data, dynamics, and decisions. It enables you to take a step back, reassess whether the path you’re on is still the right one, and be open to critiquing your own coaching decisions. And the greater the quality of your reflections, the more rapid growth you’ll see of yourself, and your clients.
This isn’t about blindly following a plan. Instead, the log helps you reflect on whether your interventions are actually helping the team or if they need to be adjusted. It’s a process of continuous learning and self-improvement, ensuring that your coaching remains dynamic and adaptive to the team’s evolving needs.
Summary
A coach log isn’t just about keeping track of your coaching sessions—it’s about fostering deliberate, thoughtful practice. In the fast-paced world of agile coaching, it’s easy to jump from one issue to another, acting on impulse or intuition. But a coach log gives you the space to step back, reflect, and listen more carefully to both the team and yourself.
This isn’t only about staying on course—it’s about critically examining the path you’ve chosen. The log allows you to revisit your interpretations, challenge your assumptions, and assess whether the direction you’re heading is still the right one. It’s a tool for ongoing learning and self-improvement, encouraging you to slow down, document what’s happening, and ultimately make better, more intentional decisions for long-term team growth.
By integrating a coach log into your routine, you move from reactive, spur-of-the-moment coaching to a more thoughtful, deliberate practice that leads to meaningful and lasting impact. But the coach-log only helps if you’re willing to put in the effort of reflecting before, during, and after interventions.