Scrum Master’s Success Measure

I am always wondering how Scrum Masters are evaluating their success or a failure. How they are attributing a success of their team — as their own success on mentoring and coaching the team, or as a victory of all allied forces starting from fancy pants in Product Department and ending at some DevOps guy fingertips?

I found for myself three Scrum Master success indicators: happy team, happy customers (and the Product Owner as their representative) and a working , nicely crafted software. Exclude one, and the problems will follow:

• Unhappy team will increase employee turnover in the company, that will lead to replacement expenses (recruiting, education of newcomers), that will increase a technical debt (experienced people, while mentoring newcomers, will have less time to focus on software crafting), technical debt will lead to less performing software with more bugs, more bugs mean less happy customers, less happy customers mean less money, less money and more bugs mean more pressure on developers, more pressure on developers mean even less happy team.
• Unhappy customers mean less money, less money mean less opportunities for experiments with product features (A/B testing, prototyping), less experiments mean less understanding of user’s needs and behaviour, less understanding leads to more wrong decision, wrong decisions mean less money, less money means fewer good developers will stay in the company, fewer good developers in the company means more bugs in your product, more bugs in your product means more customers will become unhappy.
• Poorly crafted software means less customer satisfaction, less customer satisfaction means fewer loyal customers, fewer loyal customers mean more opportunities for competitors to steal your customers, fewer customers you have it’s harder to get a momentum for growth, harder to get a momentum — more money you need to spend on marketing, more money for marketing mean less money for development, less money for development mean .. and ad infinitum like that, folks.

That’s why this is my success measure, that is what I am fighting for during my daily routine, despite it might not be so obvious for people around.

NB. Guys and gals, make a note for yourself that even when I am having my daily nap, the only thing I’m dreaming about are these three things!