How many years experience do you have?

Being a Scrum Master

About this series: Looking for my next adventure I’m participating in more interviews wherein I get asked questions that cause me to reflect a bit. These are those reflections. Note: These may not be the responses I actually gave.

Gonna be a lot going on here.

I’ve seen a lot of job descriptions over the years. They’re all different, even for the same job title. Makes sense. Having said that, I don’t think I’ve seen as much variation than that of the Scrum Master. I get it, to a certain extent, it’s a new role still figuring its life out and organizations aren’t always able to translate what they know to this new thing, which is easier than creating an opening out of whole cloth. What makes this one different is that the Scrum Master role has a canonical base definition that the Agile community kind of agrees to.

The Scrum Guide is the canonical definition for base Scrum. In the guide there is a definition for what the responsibilities of the Scrum Master are. Further, the Scrum Guide states that if we remove any of the components we cannot call it Scrum, this is how I view the Scrum Master, if we remove a responsibility, not a Scrum Master. Therefore, when I see job descriptions for Scrum Masters that go beyond what’s listed there, I tend to think “and”. So, some of these job descriptions scare me. Not because I can’t do it but because I can’t do it all with any high degree of efficacy and effectiveness.

There’s also the idea of what qualifies as experience. Having a job title for such a young job title (young, in the grand scheme of things) might disqualify someone who has been working for a company that is doing “Dark Scrum” or “Scrum But” and the person they believe are doing Scrum Master things is called the IT Project Manager — disqualified for a position as Scrum Master. (Arguments can be made regarding whether you really want to work for that company, but sometimes you just want to keep eating.)

There’s also the idea of time spent in a specific role, which equates to experience in the eyes of many. I’ve seen anywhere from 5 to 15 years being required. In the eyes of many of the organizations and recruiters I’ve been talking with, this is the minimum viable product, so to speak.

Time to do Scrum Master shit, the base of which being the values: commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect.

The Scrum Guide

As mentioned, there is a canonical definition for what the base role of a Scrum Master entails; therefore, this is kinda like the Torah compared to the Talmud. Having said that, these responsibilities could be taken on by anyone…the duty is more important than what role people have to be. (Could you imagine having a resume that only included things you’ve done without a job title or company you worked for at the time — maybe that’ll be an experiment for the next iteration of mine.)

This uses the 2018 Scrum Guide, fair warning.

The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide.

It’s that last bit that I see most often lacking in Scrum Masters: promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. I cannot tell you the number of working Scrum Masters (people employed by someone else with that title) I’ve interacted with who do not know the Scrum Guide exists, don’t know who Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber are, and don’t even know what the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is; each subsequent group being smaller than the latter. Further, many of the Scrum Masters who do know, never reference it…ever…no really, they never use it to explain Scrum to their teams, which degrades the permanence of learning because the teams are holding the Scrum Guide in their head with no reference to where that information came from. Finally, there are some folks who are doing good work in this regard.

Scrum Masters do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values.

Teacher and learner — continuously. Nothing stays the same (we’ll talk more about that later when it comes to experience). I cannot tell you the number of Scrum Masters I’ve run into that are still saying the ideal team size is 3–9 people or 7 plus or minus two or three or whatever the old language was.

So, when teams and organizations ask their newly hired Scrum Master and ask how big the teams should be; or, the Scrum Master sees large teams, they might say, “You’re doing it wrong.” Despite the language regarding development team size being changed ca. 2015, if memory serves. The paragraph begins: “Optimal Development Team size is small enough to remain nimble and large enough to complete significant work within a Sprint.”

The guide goes on to discuss large and small team sizes. If the Scrum Guide were an operating system, how many of us are still running Windows 3.1? Highly recommend installing the updates.

The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team.

Not a manager in the hierarchical approach…servant-leaders share power not consolidate power. Serves the Scrum Team (Product Owner, self, and Development Team) first.

The Scrum Master helps those outside the Scrum Team understand which of their interactions with the Scrum Team are helpful and which aren’t.

If the Scrum Team isn’t comfortable having a chat with the organization and upper management about helpful and damaging interactions then I say to myself: suit up samurai, you’re up.

As a servant to the team, it is all our jobs to make transparent that which others may lack the courage (and other values) to do so. Having said that, the Scrum Master is supposed to be the embodiment in my eyes. I used to tell people all the time, “I do apologize, sometimes when I say ‘I’ what I’m doing is taking on the voice of the team; so, it’s not me personally but I’ve embodied the emotion and ideas of the team.”

I’ve been in organizations with a blame culture. I say something that’s blunt or that someone doesn’t like. The person I’m talking with asks, “Who said that?” with the intent being to “handle” that person in some way. My typical response, “Doesn’t matter who. It matters what and why. If I had said it, what would happen to me as a result. Someone believes we (the organization as a whole) should talk about this. Are we going to?”

The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team.

The Scrum Team is responsible for maximizing the value created by the team. (The Product Owner though is the accountable person.)

Serving the Product Owner

Ensuring that goals, scope, and product domain are understood by everyone on the Scrum Team as well as possible;

In order to do this honestly, the Scrum Master either has to have the knowledge or be able to ask appropriate questions and make the appropriate observations to explore the knowledge of the individuals on the team. (This is sort of the plight of recruiters and even some hiring managers in organizations — they don’t know Agile, Scrum, or the teams. Bad position to be in.)

Finding techniques for effective Product Backlog management;

Either need a collection of resources, have really good search-fu to find, or be able to make stuff up based on who you have and what you’ve observed.

Helping the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items;

Teaching people how to communicate effectively in written form, which is one of the communication formats with the lowest bandwidth. Good times. (English majors of the world unite!)

Understanding product planning in an empirical environment;

This implies that you should know how to plan a product, scale back requirements in such a way as to facilitate incremental development and deployment. It also implies needing an understanding of empiricism (scientists of the world unite — come be Scrum Masters an Army of one! samurai metaphor seems to be holding).

Ensuring the Product Owner knows how to arrange the Product Backlog to maximize value;

Implies that you have good time management skills. Because with personal productivity, you are the Product Owner and the product is your life. When you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to an infinite number of alternatives. How do you make that choice in a way to maximize the value created overall?

Understanding and practicing agility

The ability to change direction while moving at speed. Adjusting to change over following a plan. (The Manifesto.)

Facilitating Scrum events as requested or needed.

Implies understanding of the purpose for the 4 Scrum events (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective). Implies knowledge of facilitating meetings through practice or formal education. Implies the Scrum Master does not have to actually facilitate all of them — maybe the Development Team and PO do themselves — which has other implications.

Serving the Development Team

Coaching the Development Team in self-organization and cross-functionality;

What does the guide mean by “self-organization” at its most basic? “Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team.” So, just like Scrum Masters serve the PO in organizing or prioritizing the Product Backlog, the Scrum Master needs to be able to help the Development Team prioritize the work in the Sprint Backlog, which may be different than that work with the PO (dependencies, for example, may be different).

What does the guide mean by “cross-functionality” at its most basic? “Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team.” So, helping the Scrum Team minimize dependency on other teams to complete the work in the Product Backlog. There are all sorts of implications here.

Removing impediments to the Development Team’s progress;

The guide does not go into detail regarding what constitutes an impediment. Is an imprediment only something that could stop the team from achieving their Sprint Goal? Or, is it a power of and situation? The way I look at this part of my role is to reduce friction between the people making something and the people who want that thing; therefore, it’s a lot broader.

Suit up, samurai, time to do some shit.

I spent two or three months completely changing the development environment for a program once. It started with me trying to do something small in the environment for training. I talked with other Scrum Masters; they all kinda had a “What are you gonna do?” attitude about the situation. So, I followed process and made a ticket raising the impediment. After over two dozen emails, some were less than kind, between me and the lead of the team responsible for the environment (along with others) we scheduled a meeting (I think the CIO was about to get involved, if memory serves). At the meeting I used my UX background and just demonstrated, empirically the difference between what developers are accustomed to compared to what we had — and timed it. The normal way took 5 minutes compared to 15 minutes for the environment we had told developers to use (and that’s even after a technical 10 minute head start because I didn’t download packages in our environment). Now the developers don’t have to use that environment anymore.

My title at the time was not Scrum Master. Someone has to do the work. If no one else is willing, even all the “real” Scrum Masters, it’s time to suit up samurai.

Coaching the Development Team in organizational environments in which Scrum is not yet fully adopted and understood.

Suit up samurai, you’re up.

Scrum is something of a subculture with values, principles, and practices. If the broader (and majority) organizational culture is different it can create a lot of tension between the team and those beyond the team. (See previous quote regarding the Scrum Master helping those outside the team understand their interactions with the team.) So, if no one wants to step up, I do.

That’s why I think the samurai reference is better than the Superman or Batman characters I’ve seen elsewhere. The referee one is still okay but incomplete. Samurai on the other hand, you could take some damage as well (not Superman) and you don’t have almost infinite resources to make something happen (Batman). You, your sword, and some pretty light armor (maybe a horse).

Leading and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption;

For some, this is the distinction reserved for Agile Coaches, a different role. Scrum Masters work with teams, Agile Coaches work with the organization. I was really happy to see Lyssa Adkins (the person who introduced me at least to the term Agile Coach) say, “Scrum Masters are Agile Coaches” in a video she released addressing the question. For me, I would say, if you aren’t implementing Scrum, go with Agile Coach.

Just like the team needs to know how to operate in a non-Scrum organization, it’s a two way street and I get to help the organization try to handle having this Scrum subculture.

Planning Scrum implementations within the organization;

Where is the organization and what are the plans? Do they just want to do one team? Is the plan for this team to be a starter that multiplies over time? No matter what, Scrum Masters are contributing to that larger conversation and related activities.

I decided to skip the last few because I think we’ve covered the information related to them.

What qualifies experience?

What about working as a self-employed person (1099), does that count? If not, I lose three years of experience points right there despite people paying me for the value delivered. What about personal or community projects? If not, I’m not getting any experience points for the work I’m doing with the Marked team…and neither are the developers; no value for creating free and open source software outside the pleasure?

I think what folks are trying to do here is mitigate risk by finding someone who has worked in a similar environment for a certain period of time. This is the lift and shift concept. If I lift this person from Bank A who’s been there for 20 years, then shift them into Bank B they will be better than hiring someone off the street. For more mechanical work, I could see that working out better than with knowledge work. Humans are a diverse lot.

This is how we end up hiring someone who’s been a Scrum Master for 15 years only to watch them struggle. Because they spent that 15 years in the same organization, that didn’t change much over that time. Further, they had only that team with little to no churn in that time period. In that 15 years they had one class and never revisited that education. And, the organization this person worked for “went Agile” by shifting the name of title Project Manager to Scrum Master. Finally, the organization is not in a position, for whatever reason, to train and coach this person. Not saying it’s a guarantee that this person will struggle a great deal but they’re not really setup for success; neither from they’re own effort nor the organization that hired them.

Time in grade

Most job descriptions I see require 5 years of experience. I remember asking multiple recruiters, “Are they looking for years of experience overall or years of experience where someone other than me gave me the literal title of ‘Scrum Master’?” The response has usually been, “Someone else giving your the title.” To which my reply is, “I don’t meet the requirement then. Thank you for thinking of me though.” Funny story, “I had a recruiter ask if we could change one of my titles because I think the description you give is kinda close, yeah?” My reply was, “That’s because I also do the same stuff. I don’t care what my title is. I just want my client to be successful. But, if they check, they will not be told my title was Scrum Master.”

There’s a couple of things I find fascinating that I run into here. One is the notion of years of experience overall. Another is number of recent years of experience.

I knew a person once who said he had 20 years of experience doing software development. As I probed, I discovered the experience was working in Assembly and COBOL and he hadn’t done it for 20 years. The use it or lose concept, which brings us to the concept of recency.

I had a recruiter tell me the client was looking for someone with 5 years experience over the last 10 years, preferably with the last title being that of Scrum Master. “Well, that’s not me.”

I don’t fault anyone for this concept. There’s something to be said for someone acquiring knowledge over a period of time and the decay rate of knowledge. That’s one of the reasons the Fold System at 8fold works the way it does or the concept of continuing education credits for some certifications.

It’s an interesting problem

Putting on my user experience and Product Owner hats on, this whole resume thing is an interesting problem. To the best of my knowledge, the easiest way to find work is still by knowing someone on the inside. Next best is knowing a good recruiter (who’s a proxy to knowing someone on the inside). A resume is pretty much dead last and there’s a cottage industry around it. Maybe I should said that rest of that for the next one.

Back to the question at hand. How does one answer this question? I’ve been trying something along the lines of, “Under what criteria?”