Beyond the Framework: What Great Scrum Masters Really Do

These are the compliments I'm the most happy to receive nowadays. 😍

In my first years of Scrum Mastering, my main focus was to implement that damn framework. Check all the boxes. Wear them as medals of honor to testify my own quality as a Scrum Master. 🎖

Years later, I don't care that much anymore. Not because it's useless, but because my focus has now shifted to the team and how I can best support it. 💁‍♂️ Blurring those lines about Roles & Responsibilities is what got me closer to the teams' real challenges and struggles, and tackling them with the right response... sometimes it's from the typical Scrum Master toolbox, sometimes it's not 🤷‍♂️

We all heard these feedbacks about Scrum Masters being rigid about the "Scrum rules" (which are often not even parts of Scrum). They're not the ones making people positive about Scrum (and Agile, by extension), they're the ones creating the resistance to Agile practices as we see more and more. I probably contributed to that in my early days and I'm very happy to have switched sides. ✌

Keep in mind that you can lead a team to apply the framework perfectly... while still delivering crap. Where's our value there? 💡