Overview

• What you’ll learn: The Scrum Master accountability, servant leadership, how SMs serve the team, the PO, and the organization, and what a Scrum Master is NOT.
• Prerequisites: Lesson 10 — The Product Owner.
• Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Introduction

The Scrum Master is perhaps the most misunderstood accountability in Scrum. In many organizations, the “Scrum Master” is just a project manager with a new title — someone who assigns tasks, tracks progress, and reports status to management. This is exactly wrong.

The Scrum Master is a servant-leader. They serve the team by helping them become more effective, removing impediments that block progress, and ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted as described in the Scrum Guide. They lead not by authority, but by influence, coaching, and facilitation.

Servant Leadership

Servant leadership inverts the traditional hierarchy. Instead of the team serving the leader, the leader serves the team. The Scrum Master’s job is to make the team successful — not to make themselves look important.

• Coaching: Helping team members understand Scrum theory, practices, and values.
• Facilitating: Ensuring Scrum events are productive and stay within timeboxes.
• Mentoring: Guiding team members in self-management and cross-functionality.
• Teaching: Helping the organization understand where Scrum is helpful and where it creates unnecessary complexity.
• Removing impediments: Actively identifying and resolving obstacles that prevent the team from making progress.

Serving Three Audiences

The Scrum Guide describes how the SM serves three distinct audiences:

Serving the Developers

• Coaching the team in self-management and cross-functionality.
• Helping the team focus on creating high-value Increments that meet the Definition of Done.
• Causing the removal of impediments to the team’s progress.
• Ensuring all Scrum events take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox.

Serving the Product Owner

• Helping find techniques for effective Product Goal definition and Product Backlog management.
• Helping the team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items.
• Helping establish empirical product planning for a complex environment.
• Facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed.

Serving the Organization

• Leading, training, and coaching the organization in Scrum adoption.
• Planning and advising Scrum implementations within the organization.
• Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact an empirical approach for complex work.
• Removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams.

What the Scrum Master is NOT

Key Takeaways

• The Scrum Master is a servant-leader who enables the team’s effectiveness.
• They serve three audiences: Developers, the Product Owner, and the organization.
• The SM coaches, facilitates, mentors, teaches, and removes impediments.
• The SM is NOT a project manager, not a boss, not a meeting secretary.
• Leadership comes through influence, not authority.

What’s Next

In Lesson 12, you will explore the Developers accountability — the cross-functional professionals who create the Increment each Sprint.