Unlocking Legitimacy: Scrum Masters as Partnership Managers of Product and Tech

If you google for: “What is a Scrum Master doing all day?”, you will most likely get definitions from the Scrum Guide:

The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. Scrum Masters do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values.

The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team. The Scrum Master helps those outside the Scrum Team understand which of their interactions with the Scrum Team are helpful and which aren’t. The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team.” — Scrum Guide, 2022.

So far so good, but helping people understand is not really a business goal. So it’s pretty easy to reduce the Scrum Masters role down to: They moderate meetings, calculate capacity and make sure everyone has fun. So why should that even be a real job?

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

After working two years at reveal.co, where we focused a lot on the partnership manager’s persona and their struggles to prove their value to sales leaders — a challenge that my fellow Scrum Masters and I knew quite well — I looked into the strategies that the fantastic content team at reveal was providing and asked myself what kind of ideas I could take from that for my own career.

Whats a partnership manager in the sales context?

A Partnership Manager in the sales context is like a relationship architect for businesses. Their primary role is to connect your company with other external organizations in meaningful and mutually beneficial ways. It’s not just about selling products; it’s about building strategic alliances. They work to establish and nurture partnerships with other companies, ensuring that both parties can achieve more together than they could separately. This involves negotiating agreements, developing joint plans for marketing and sales, and fostering open communication. Think of them as bridge-builders who connect your business with others, creating collaborative opportunities that lead to shared success and growth.

At their core, Scrum Masters and Partnership Managers are orchestrators of collaboration. While Scrum Masters facilitate cooperation within cross-functional teams in the product and tech domains, Partnership Managers foster collaboration between internal teams and external partners to drive business success.

Furthermore, both roles necessitate strategic alignment with broader organizational goals. Partnership Managers align their initiatives with revenue generation and business outcomes, whereas Scrum Masters must align agile practices with the overarching objectives of the company. This strategic alignment ensures that every effort contributes directly to the organization’s success, reinforcing the value proposition of both roles.

Ownership and proactivity are inherent characteristics shared by Scrum Masters and Partnership Managers. Partnership Managers take ownership of partnership programs, steering them towards success. Similarly, Scrum Masters should take ownership of the product development narrative, actively shaping the feature delivery process. Proactivity, whether in anticipating challenges or facilitating continuous improvement, is a common trait that distinguishes both roles as proactive enablers of success.

In this context you could easily say that a Scrum Master is a partnership manager of the Tech x Product Partnership.

It’s therefore not surprising that Scrum Masters can draw insights from the partnership management playbook to enhance their influence and validate their contribution within the product and tech teams..

So what’s the learning here?

The learning to take from this is not an easy action that you can take to become a better Scrum Master / Agile Coach by tomorrow. It’s more a way of defining the role that helped me better do my job.

Because one thing that the partnership managers and the Scrum Masters jobs also have in common is the lack of legitimacy coming from the massiv lack of measurement.

As a sales partnership manager people might think that you drink coffee with external people all day and have zero impact on the sales pipeline. As a Scrum Master even your colleagues might think that your only purpose is to be fun in meetings without providing any input.

If you’ve done one of these jobs, we both know that this is not the full story. The issue I faced myself is that even if you google for agile trainings you will find a lot of resources that are pretty soft-skill oriented. Which is never a bad thing, but being a great facilitator that is constantly creating a save space for everyone is hard to proof.

In the current economic landscape, the primary focus for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches should be to proof their value in closing features successfully and to achieve the goals the company set themselves when deciding to be agile.

This goes beyond the traditional facilitation of meetings and ensuring team happiness; it delves into actively contributing to the product development lifecycle. By aligning their efforts with the tangible outcomes of feature delivery, Scrum Masters can establish themselves as integral players in achieving business goals and first an for most make this measurable!

In practice Scrum Masters seeking to enhance feature delivery and validate their impact, could focus on these areas:

Meetings:

• Timelineness: Do your meetings start and end on time? If not, how late/early are they? If you’re tracking this in a spreadsheet, keep it simple, and just track whether the meeting started/ended “5 minutes or less” behind schedule or “more than 5 minutes” behind schedule.
• Attendance: Track the number of people you invite versus how many actually attend. Habitual absences or tardiness are some of the clearest symptoms of a broken meeting culture, so if you see this pattern, address the underlying cause quickly to make big improvements fast.
• Time planned vs Time spend: Many agendas benefit by listing a planned time for each item. When this is the case, keep a timer handy during the meeting to track how much time you actually spend on each agenda item. If you regularly take only a few minutes in a meeting, maybe this could be an async conversation or if a meeting regularly takes longer than expected, maybe it’s worth splitting it into separate sessions.
• Participation & Engagement: There are plenty of metrics to track here. In the context of efficient meetings, I would recommend to track: ratio of attending people vs actively contributing people. If you have a discussion meeting with 10 attendees but only two are actually speaking with each other, this is a great indicator that the process could be improved.

Delivery:

• Time-to-Market: How long does it take from when we start a subject until we deliver something valuable? You might determine average time to market based on the minimum and maximum times it’s currently taking to get an valuable increment deployed to production or released to customers. I would combine this with a T-Shirt size estimation of the subject. Therefore you can measure the average: Time-to-customer for an XS / S / M sized subject.
• Predictability: Predictability measures the ratio of “planned” to “completed”. In doing so, the metric documents how much work a team committed to at the beginning of the sprint and how much they completed at the end of the sprint.
• Dealing with impediments: If obstacles and impediments arise in processes, Scrum Masters are responsible for removing them. To track this you could use an impediment-log, where you track when an issue arise, the solution the Scrum Master proposed. If an issue is not coming up again, you could argue that the issue was resolved.
• Velocity: Velocity is a measure of the amount of work a Team can tackle during a single Sprint and is the key metric in Scrum. Velocity is calculated at the end of the Sprint by totalling the Points for all fully completed user story.
  Important: Velocity is a good metric for Scrum Teams to leverage for its internal purpose with the idea of continuous improvement. The moment this metric is used for any other purpose, the teams and organization will lose the benefits that Scrum has to offer. This will result in Zero-sum game for the entire organization and they will lose focus on their Agility goals.
• Cycle Time: Average Cycle time, the time work items spend in the system. Definitions here can vary in different organizations, particularly on where to place the start and finish times that define CT.
• Throughput: Throughput rate, meaning the average number of work items closed in a certain time period. As most of the other metrics, Throughput itself won’t say a lot about your team. But combined it can be a great indicator for underlying issues. For instance if you have a pretty long time-to-market although it also has a high velocity. In this case, if you look at the throughput, you could see that although the team has a high velocity, the throughput is pretty low and this could mean that the user stories might be too big.
• Blocked Time: How much time does the Scrum Team spend outside of the sprint-work.
• Escaped Defects Rate: Some teams only track problems found by customers and end-users. Others also include problems discovered during QA or other phases outside of the development team’s realm. In Agile utopia, teams fix all problems before delivering a piece of work. In reality, this rarely happens. Without measuring the Escaped Defect Rate, it’s difficult to determine how many issues slip through the team’s process unnoticed. If the EDR is high, while throughput is high and cycle time low, could be an indicator that the team is missing some depth in the review and testing phase.

More! Be creative and analyse your use case and what you could bring to the table to support your product and engineering teams.

In conclusion, the journey of a Scrum Master transforming into a true Partnership Manager of Product and Tech involves recognizing the shared DNA with Partnership Managers and breaking free from the stereotype of meeting moderation and just the funny person.

By embracing proactive engagement, strategic alignment, and ownership, Scrum Masters can redefine their role and proof their impact within the organization.

The proposed metrics provide a tangible pathway for Scrum Masters to measure their influence, ensuring that their efforts resonate with the business objectives of successful feature delivery. As Scrum Masters navigate the landscapes of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement, they not only unlock their own legitimacy but also become instrumental in steering the narrative of feature delivery towards organizational success.

The next time someone wonders what a Scrum Master does all day, the answer transcends meeting facilitation — it encompasses the art of orchestrating collaboration and driving the seamless execution of features for a thriving product and tech partnership.

Want to learn more about sales partnerships check out: nearbound.com