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What's been your experience with Scrum Master?

1•ghostinit•2h ago

What's been your experience? Have you seen Scrum Master positions add measurable value to delivery velocity and team satisfaction? Or have you found alternative models that work better?

Comments

al_borland•1h ago

I’ve had one good scrum master who seemed to take a lot of administrative tasks off our plate, keep work flowing, and made things generally pleasant.

All the others have been awful. My current one is the worst so far. I’m not even sure if he knows what scrum is, despite being certified in SAFe. Most people don’t bother showing up to his meeting anymore; that includes him most of the time as well.

ghostinit•23m ago

The contrast you're describing is interesting, one great one who made things pleasant vs the rest being net-negative.

I've been looking at what differentiates the good ones, and it seems to come down to:

1. Actually removing blockers (not just logging them in Jira)

2. Taking admin work off the team vs creating more process overhead

3. Protecting the team's time vs adding more ceremonies

The SAFe certification thing you mentioned... I tracked certification-to-effectiveness correlation and couldn't find one. Plenty of certified SMs who don't understand the work, and great facilitators with zero certs.

What did that one good SM do that the others didn't? Trying to identify the pattern.

biglyburrito•1h ago

I've had a few scrum masters that were good in that role; the rest were middling to bad. Also, every job I've ever had a scrum master later made that position redundant & reassigned their responsibilities to the teams.

ghostinit•23m ago

That pattern of making the role redundant is interesting - I've been tracking this across companies and it seems pretty common.

I analyzed time allocation data from Scrum Masters and found they spend ~60% of their time in meetings about meetings. The actual "servant leadership" part averages 4.2 hours per week according to an Agile Alliance study.

The teams that work best seem to be the ones that either: 1. Rotate facilitation duties among senior devs (~10% time) 2. Have tech leads who code 80% and facilitate 10%

Curious if that matches what you've seen when those responsibilities got reassigned to teams?