Scrum Master ❤ Team Lead ?

Does a Scrum Master need to/can be a team lead?

I really believe that a Scrum Master should be a servant-leader, but the key issue is the leader part. In my opinion, we can distinguish (in general) two types of leaders:

Technology focused (tech lead) — their focus is on the technical details. Most of the time they became a leader because of their knowledge. Tech leads have deep knowledge and a lot of experience in development in general. They take care of architecture, set up guidelines, and “development culture”. Most probably they see a big value in technical processes (TDD, BDD, CI, CD…). This type of leader can be a great mentor to the rest of the team as they usually have solutions for any problem you can throw at them.

Common mistake: too often the most senior member is promoted to be a team leader. Unfortunately, great technical knowledge has nothing to do with people management. This mistake can be very expensive.

People focused (team lead) — in this case, their concentration is more addressed towards the individuals in the team. This person is more people and team oriented rather than a software developer. He believes that “the sky is the limit” and the only thing to achieve this goal (sky), is to help them move in the right direction. This type of person can improve the technical skills of his colleagues without deep domain knowledge but in this case, it will be much harder.

Common mistake: some companies tend to hire team leads without ANY technical knowledge. From the development team’s point of view, this can be annoying and quite silly. Maybe he/she knows how to deal with people, but a lack of domain knowledge can significantly prolong the team building process.

Let’s go back to our assumption at the beginning of the article and make one more.

The Scrum Master is a servant-leader. Architecture, design, and quality emerge from the team.

Based on that hypothesis, consider what can be the potential benefits and disadvantages when the Scrum Master is also in tech/team lead role.

NOPE

• The tech lead can overrule architectural decicions, causing damage to the self-organisation of a team.
• The Scrum Master should be impartial in terms of implementation of deliverables.
• Potential conflict of interest — boss vs leader.
• Lack of the time to develop the people and the team.
• It’s a potential risk that tech lead will focus more on the technology process (TDD, CI, CD…) then on people development and processes (continuous improvement., e.g. retrospectives).
• Team lead who is focused more on people, can’t understand developer’s language (hands-on, architectural issue, JAVA!).
• Due to lack of knowledge, the team lead can have problems supporting the product owner in requirement translation and identifying the best person or resource to solve a technical issue.

YEP

• Tech leads know how to translate requirements into technical language and identify potential risks.
• Tech leads can propose and implement good Agile (Scrum, XP) practice (TDD, BDD, CI, CD) that can help the team deliver in a more efficient way.
• Most probably the team lead will have more time for people because he is not involved in coding activities. As a result, he can spend this time on people and team development.
• The tech lead and team lead are much closer to the team so they are part of the team dynamics.
• The tech lead and team lead know what is happening inside the team, what are the potentials risks related to the project and people management.