5 Things Your Scrum Master Wants You To Know
If you’re skilled in the ways of Scrum you probably already know what a Sprint is; you might have heard the phrase ‘fail fast’ enough times to run out of fingers to count on; maybe, if you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ve even seen a beautifully perfected burndown chart. In my role as Move content writer and Scrum Master at Twinkl Educational Publishing, we rely on Scrum working to manage our projects and workloads, and find it works really well for our teams.
In this article, you’ll be glad to know I’m not about to bore you with technical language and Agile diagrams. Instead, here are five things your Scrum Master wants you to know — and I promise I won’t use the phrase ‘fail fast’ even once. 😉
1. We are here for you
If you’ve read any Scrum guides you will already know this, but let me say it again: we, as your Scrum Masters, are here for you. Whatever your role in the development team, we are here for you. Our role is to help you be the best team you can be, to make sure you have everything you need, and to make sure you feel safe and secure in what you’re doing. Without you, the Scrum team, there would be no Scrum Master: you’re the reason we do what we do.
2. Your Product Owner is not your enemy
I see you there, hiding that knowing glance or giggle under your breath… I know you know what I’m talking about…
The development team might not include the Product Owner but the Scrum team sure does. They are not your boss, they are not there to tell you off if you got nine tasks finished but not the tenth. They don’t come to ceremonies like Retrospectives to ‘catch you out’. They are there for the same reasons we all are: to make the best product in the best way for the best results. Your Product Owner knows the stakeholders, knows what customers need, knows where the product’s ultimate destination is, but we’re all on the journey together. So don’t think of them as your enemy, think of them as your friend. Talk to them, listen to them, be open and remember your shared goal; if you do that, the journey will be as much of an adventure as the destination itself.
3. You are safe to fail
I promised I wouldn’t say that phrase, but we can’t talk about Agile without talking about failure. J.M. Barrie, the genius who brought Tinkerbell into our world, wrote that ‘we are all failures — at least, the best of us are’. The idea of failure has come to be a negative thing these days, and one blog post is not enough time to convince you of the wrongness of that; but it is, perhaps, enough to remind you that within Scrum, failure is crucial. I am a bit of a hoarder of words and could reel off a dozen quotes about failure, but I’ll just give you this one from Henry Ford:
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
I’m not sure Scrum was a thing when Ford wrote that, but his sentence couldn’t be more perfectly Agile if it tried! We will fail. You will fail. There will be a Sprint where you don’t complete everything you thought you would, where there are 17 conversions instead of 24, or where you run out of time to get a project on site for its deadline. These might feel like failures, but they are, in fact, opportunities. From that negative user review you might learn what not to do next time; from those stakeholder comments you might learn what the team can add in to next Sprint to achieve a new definition of ‘done’. Not meeting a deadline might identify where you need to plan earlier next time; and not completing tasks might help us better realise our capacities and make us more collaborative and cross-skilled. Failure happens and in Scrum we embrace it as an opportunity to begin again, to head into a new Sprint with lessons learnt and ideas shared and, ultimately, to succeed even more magnificently in the end.
4. We want to hear your voice
If something isn’t working, we want to know. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, we want to know. If you need help to complete a task, we want to know. Scrum Masters might be a magical bunch, but we aren’t mind-readers… yet! However you feel comfortable sharing your voice — whether through written words or GIFs or face-to-face conversations over coffee or dots on post-its in Retrospectives, we value your opinion and will listen. So tell us: tell us your concerns and tell us your ideas, tell us your problems and tell us your solutions, tell us if we’re doing a good job and tell us if we can do more. As the inspiring Brené Brown wrote, ‘It’s as if we’ve divided the world into ‘those who offer help’ and ‘those who need help’. The truth is that we are both.’ From your voice and your words, we build a better Scrum team and a better Scrum company.
5. We actually want to not be needed!
Fun fact about me: I wanted to be Emma Thompson when I grew up. I mean, let’s face it, who doesn’t want to be Emma Thompson… And Emma Thompson, or rather Nanny McPhee, once shared this golden nugget of wisdom:
“When you need me but no longer want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I must go.”
A good Scrum Master is like Nanny McPhee: we want to support our teams to get to a point where they no longer need a Scrum Master. Why? Because then we will know they have become so efficient, so secure, so collaborative and so Agile that they will be their own Masters of Scrum. Until then, think of us as your very own Nanny McPhee. We’ll be there for you, reminding you of how to be good Scrummers, not cleaning up messes but showing you how to pick up the mop in that loving way good nannies do, listening to you and sneakily giving you fun things to do… all of us growing and becoming a stronger and more successful family as we do.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read Peter Pan while I watch Nanny McPhee… for Scrum research purposes, of course 😉
Lizzie Law is Content Editor, Scrum Master and Team Leader at Twinkl Educational Publishing. She is passionate about learning and helping great people do great things.
