[randallsquared]

Absolutely a thing. Our dedicated agile lead establishes and "runs" a 15-person standup, story refinements three days a week, a short S2 standup three days a week, sprint planning, product increment (three-sprint groupings) planning and pre-planning meetings, a demo and a retrospective and a standing "team lead AMA" every sprint, and handles setting up inter- and intra-team discussions when that need is expressed in standup or via slack. Also, they maintain "Program" section on our team wiki, set up story boards and pull team velocity metrics, and generally work full time doing all the things that I would be doing for these teams as a team lead, if they weren't there.

Having been without an agile lead for a couple months this summer, I'm acutely aware of how much they do, because they're often doing things that I was just letting drop on the floor as non-emergency.

[ryan_lane]

Most of those things are busy work, and provide no actual benefit to a team being productive. I've worked on a lot of teams, and the teams with this amount of planning structure tend to be the ones that perform the worst, while also having the most unhappy members. It sounds like you're spending a pretty considerable amount of time in meetings!

If you need an agile lead, there's something seriously messed up in the management of your org.

[Redsquare]

15 person standup...speaks volumes

[randallsquared]

Well, it's three teams (hence three of some things), but things have gone more smoothly so far when we operate as a megateam. :)