We saw a lot of job descriptions for the role of ScrumMaster which were fundamentally incorrect. A lot of them mentioned management of team members, assigning tasks, even playing responsibilities of Product Owners.

We thought “Enough is enough”. It is the 21st century and agile must be played properly to not make people more upset about it.

As a Scrum Master you’ll develop and lead high-performing, multi-discipline team, instilling in them a clear vision and a passionate drive. You’ll play a leading role in fulfilling the vision, driving the implementation of our products and setting standards for our teams to follow.

Key Accountabilities

• Changing the culture of the company towards changes welcome culture based on transparency, trust and high-level collaboration.
• Ownership and accountability of establishing agile values, methods, principles and practices for the delivery of projects and products.
• A building of a self-organized team.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies, e.g. product backlog refinement, preplanning, planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, retrospectives.
• Conflicts resolution.
• Enables the exploration of different agile approaches.
• Coach and mentor team members on agile standards and best practices, e., Lean, Kanban, Scrum, XP, DevOps, SAFe, LeSS, etc.
• Ensure the correct setup of CDI tools for projects.
• Configure and maintain an agile project management tool (ScrumDesk, JIRA, etc.).
• Manage stakeholders and vendors interfaces as required for the product.
• Challenging and improving the operation of the team, improving their performance and capabilities.
• Build operating models that value ownership, responsibility, responsiveness, predictability, and
• Remove blockers.
• Collaborate closely with Product Owner to prepare and clarify the product backlog.
• Supporting and educating the Product Owner, especially with respect to refining and managing the product backlog
• As a problem solver, you eliminate conflicts, assist your team in developing appropriate solution strategies, and keep an eye on potential future tensions.
• You observe your team in the cooperation and the application of agile methods and deduce from it measures, g. training and de-escalations.
• Together, you and other (senior) Scrum Masters, agile specialists and coaches on all organizational levels work together.
• You represent the team interests towards relevant stakeholders and work out improvement for areas of tension within the agile transformation.
• Provides a deeper understanding of the team’s reporting.
• Supports the agile transformation together with Agile Working Group.
• Actively participates in communities.
• Assessing the Scrum Maturity of the team and coaching them to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable.
• Building a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged, with an emphasis on healing and problem-solving.
• Support the team to improve their technical work by reviewing results and establish lessons learned as well as track the improvement.
• Facilitates getting the work done without coercion, assigning, or dictating the work.

How to be prepared for this role?

• It is characterized by a high level of commitment and the will to develop high-performance teams.
• Basic IT and software development skills. Soft skills are more important for this role.
• A can-do attitude, result driven and openness to learning.
• Openness to new ideas and a desire to develop them together.
• Good skills and knowledge of servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment, and increasing transparency
• Strong collaborative problem solver.
• Experience in coaching and training individuals and teams in Agile concepts and practices.
• Experience in facilitation, collaboration and soft-skills.
• Excellent communication skills and experience inside and outside of the teams.
• Scrum Master certification.
• Experience in agile practices using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe or LeSS.
• An unterest in modern management and innovation methods like Management 3.0 or Lean Startup.

Please read our article about ScrumMaster role that describes the role in more details.