A Guide to the Good Scrum Master

With the rise of agility and the cultural transformation organizations go through in their agile evolution, the Scrum Master role has taken center stage. This short article aims to give you a sense of what it means to be a good Scrum Master, and what path you can follow to strengthen your skills.

What Is Scrum?

I’m not going to spend much time answering this question. If you want to be a good Scrum Master, the first thing you need to know is what Scrum is and why it matters . That said, the short answer is that Scrum is a framework that promotes collaborative work. Scrum is geared toward small teams of people, and it promotes delivering value and solutions to challenges creatively and continuously.

Scrum is oriented around people and their interactions, not necessarily around optimizing resources. This is particularly important and effective in environments where the solution or the outcome isn’t partially or fully predictable.

To sum it up: imagine going to a party where the host already has a minute-by-minute plan for what guests should do. That doesn’t sound like a very fun party. In some contexts, it’s better for the process to include experimentation. In our party example, that means the freedom to meet people or choose what music plays — reading the room’s current mood and letting things flow at their own pace.

On the other hand, if you’re building a house, the last thing you want is for the person in charge of construction to “experiment” with your money. Most of us prefer executing the budget as efficiently as possible — as efficiently as you can get. Experimenting in a well-understood context, like building a house, becomes inefficient.

What Does Scrum Master Mean?

In the words of the Scrum Guide, the Scrum Master is the person accountable for Scrum happening correctly within the organization. To achieve that, they need to help people understand the theory and the values. They also need to walk alongside people as they apply and internalize that theory in their day-to-day work.

What Are the Scrum Master’s Responsibilities?

The Scrum Master serves several different groups of stakeholders and roles.

Responsibilities Toward the Scrum Team

Naturally, the Scrum Master’s top priority is serving and supporting the Scrum team — the people on their own team who’ve “adopted” Scrum as their way of working. I might make a few enemies by using the word “methodology” instead of “way of working,” but imagine it’s something very similar.

With that in mind, and according to the Scrum Guide — the canonical document, if there is one — the Scrum Master serves the Scrum team by:

• Coaching team members on things like self-management and cross-functionality. Something like helping people organize themselves — helping everyone learn to own their responsibilities, organize their work, and, of course, adopt a collaborative, open, and learning-oriented mindset.
• Helping the team stay focused on creating valuable increments. I could sum up “increment” as partial results with business meaning — did I say I was summarizing?
• Promoting or managing the removal of impediments — that is, mitigating, resolving, or avoiding them. Impediments are anything that slows down or limits the team’s ability to produce results.
• Making sure every Scrum event happens successfully, on time, with a good attitude, and productively.

Responsibilities Toward the Product Owner

The Product Owner is part of the Scrum team, but holds a role that sets them apart from the rest. Because of that, as a Scrum Master, you need to support the PO — not just with what we’ve already mentioned, but also by:

• Helping the PO effectively define the product goal and the process for managing the product backlog . Keep in mind your facilitation skills might come in handy to support the PO in their own meetings and activities. Your job isn’t to decide on the product — your job is to help the people who decide on the product understand the advantages of having a model like Scrum up and running.
• Helping the Scrum team understand the need for clear, concise product backlog items. Please, no parroting the line that the backlog can only hold user stories — that makes you look bad.
• Helping establish an empirical model for product planning. Keep in mind that Scrum, as I mentioned before, is designed for complex environments that require adaptation .
• Facilitating collaboration between the PO and other stakeholders outside the Scrum team.

The Scrum Master’s Responsibilities Toward the Organization

The Scrum Master has a clear scope in relation to their Scrum team — that is, developers and the Product Owner. But the Scrum Master can’t ignore the broader context their work sits within, inside the organization.

Because of that, the Scrum Master also needs to think about:

• Leading, training, and coaching the organization through its adoption of the model — that model we’re not allowed to call a methodology. :)
• Planning and advising on Scrum implementations across the organization.
• Helping employees and stakeholders understand and embrace the empirical approach to complex work.
• Removing the barriers between stakeholders and Scrum teams. This last one means helping the organization “feel” flatter and less bureaucratic — beyond the org chart, bringing Scrum teams closer to people outside the model.

Skills of a Truly Good Scrum Master

You’ve probably already figured this out, but the Scrum Master is a servant leader. And in that sense, the Scrum Master shares the same skill set.

Inspires

Inspiring isn’t the same as motivating. Once, at a conference I attended, someone made the point that inspiring means planting the seed of self-motivation. Motivating, on the other hand, is like pushing a car — stop pushing, and it stops moving.

And when I talk about inspiration, I specifically mean promoting a love for the work, for what we do, and for our team. This isn’t an attempt to put on rose-colored glasses and see everything through them. Being inspired will help you and your team hold an optimistic stance toward the challenges of the work.

Helps Strengthen Our Capabilities

The Scrum Master is a lot like a coach. They’re not trying to teach you everything firsthand — they’re not a mentor. They’re the person who, through critical, focused discussions, gets you to constantly evaluate your strengths, opportunities, and weaknesses.

The Scrum Master’s goal is to improve the team’s performance and, of course, help the business achieve the results it needs. But they can go further and build capabilities, curiosity for experimentation, and values like trust among team members. The Scrum Master drives a cultural transformation that, inevitably, is also a personal one.

Always Promotes Staying Focused

Naturally, the Scrum Master is the first person who needs to stay focused on what matters — which isn’t always what’s urgent. They need to help the PO keep their eyes on the horizon and play strategically. But the same goes for the whole team — we’re not a bunch of different “subgroups” working together. We’re one team chasing one goal.

If the Scrum Master doesn’t stay focused, the team might end up always playing to finish all the work — and that doesn’t necessarily mean achieving the business goals. How many times have your teams done everything asked of them and still failed to achieve what was actually needed? You have to stay focused.

Challenges

We’ve all had jobs or moments that pushed us. A boss from a past life used to say “chalenyear” — a mashup of the English word “challenge” with “meter presión” (piling on the pressure). And as funny as that word still sounds in my head, I get what he was trying to do (even if not always very well). Excellence — which we shouldn’t confuse with a blind pursuit of perfection — is, above all, a challenge to ourselves.

If we don’t hold onto a challenger’s mindset, we’ll probably never achieve anything exceptional. And I don’t mean exceptional as in world-changing — we can be exceptional within our own environment, for our team, and for our product or project.

We could, of course, add other qualities, like good communication, results-oriented thinking, or a continuous-learning mindset — along with being a good human being and respecting others. But we’re talking specifically about the qualities you need as a Scrum Master. You can’t be a good servant leader without good human qualities. This is a role built on contact with other human beings.

Recommendations for Becoming a Good Scrum Master

Like with anything we want or aspire to, dedication and commitment to your work — or the work you’re aiming for — is key to success. So if you want to become a good, or even great, Scrum Master, the most important thing is to commit. Here are a few useful recommendations on your path toward mastering the role.

1. Learn about Scrum. There’s a lot of literature out there, but I’d recommend starting with the basics in the Scrum Guide — the canonical version, let’s say. And maybe a book like Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time .
2. You don’t need to be a Scrum Master to be a servant leader on your team. Even if your team already has a facilitator or Scrum Master, nothing stops you from contributing. Be patient, wait for your moment to support, coordinate, facilitate, and help your team. You don’t have to neglect your own work, and you don’t need to be doing it 100% of the time — just when you spot the opportunity and the team needs it. That’s already the first step.
3. Look for the opportunity. You might not have the chance to act as a Scrum Master in your current job, but I promise you there are multiple options out there — from volunteer activities to your own personal projects.
4. Get involved in your region’s or country’s agile community. This isn’t about connecting with all-knowing experts — those don’t exist, and all of us, to some degree, keep learning as we go. Some challenging jobs give you more scenarios to learn from; simpler ones let you apply and consolidate practices and tools. Connecting with the community can open doors to a lot of shared knowledge and experience.
5. Discover the upsides of the role, and figure out how far it can take you in your work, profession, or trade. Not everyone is aware of the advantages and limitations of the role . So take a look at job postings, at where the market stands, and find out how far these new skills can take you.
6. Get certified. I’m not a fan of certifying just for the sake of it. That said, I can’t deny that a lot of job opportunities require certification. Look for the best certifications out there. Don’t waste your money on PDF files claiming to be “international certificates” that are really just nice-looking logos with aspirational names.