Leadership Product Management Social Technologies

Focusing Beyond “Agile”: Building True Capability in Organizations

Published on 11 October 2024

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

6 minute read

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In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, focusing solely on Agile as a label can be limiting. Instead, the goal should be to increase our organization’s capability, maximize value, and enhance effectiveness. It’s not about the moniker; it’s about achieving outcomes that matter. 🏆

Why Agile Isn’t the Focus

In many organizations, the term Agile has become synonymous with processes and frameworks, leading to what I call “backlog barons” and “scrum stumblers.” Here’s what I mean:

Backlog Barons: Product owners who focus too heavily on managing backlogs without a deep understanding of the product.
Scrum Stumblers: Scrum Masters who lack the skills to guide and coach teams effectively.

This problem stems from a misalignment between the skills needed and the people hired for these roles. We need to shift our focus from simply filling positions to building capabilities.

The Problem with Incompetent Scrum Masters and Product Owners

How Demand Has Outstripped Supply

The demand for Scrum Masters and Product Owners has grown exponentially, but the supply of competent professionals has lagged behind. As a result, organizations have lowered the bar to fill open positions. This has led to:

A shortage of expertise in critical roles.
A lack of focus on continuous learning within these positions.
Hiring practices that prioritize quantity over quality.

Where We Are Now

Right now, many organizations are struggling with teams led by people who are not equipped to fulfill their roles effectively. This is not necessarily the fault of the individuals—it’s a systemic issue that needs addressing at the organizational level.

Fixing Hiring Practices to Build Competence

To move forward, we need to rethink how we hire and develop talent. Here’s what we should focus on:

1. Hire for Potential, Train for Competence

It’s okay to bring in interns or junior hires as long as they are integrated into a work context where they can learn and grow.
Focus on promoting from within to build leaders who already understand the organization’s unique context and challenges.

2. Look for Lifelong Learners

Scrum Masters and Product Owners should possess a lifelong learning mindset.
Prioritize candidates who demonstrate a willingness to continuously improve and adapt to new situations.

3. Promote Contextual Leadership

Think of leadership as two distinct roles:

Leading the Product: This is about guiding product development to deliver maximum value.
Leading the People: This involves coaching and mentoring teams to be more effective.

Personal Insight: Why Context Matters in Leadership

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some great Scrum Masters—individuals who may not have come from a software engineering background but excel in enabling their teams to succeed. For example, I’ve seen former business analysts or testers rise to the role of Scrum Master because they understand the team’s challenges and can offer actionable solutions.

How Scrum Masters Should Emerge from Within the Team

The Organic Path to Becoming a Scrum Master

A Scrum Master shouldn’t just be hired into the role—they should emerge from the team. Here’s why:

They already have team respect through their contributions.
They have a deep understanding of the work context and what makes their team tick.
They are naturally inclined to coach and support the team’s growth.

Imagine this scenario: a team member named Bob has consistently made suggestions that improve the team’s workflow. Over time, the team starts looking to Bob for guidance, eventually encouraging him to take on the Scrum Master role. This kind of organic transition leads to greater respect and better results.

Should Scrum Masters Know How to Code?

This is a question I get often, and my answer is nuanced:

No, Scrum Masters don’t need to be coders, but they should understand the basic principles that guide their teams.
It’s important for Scrum Masters to understand the patterns and practices of the domain they’re working in, whether that’s software engineering, accounting, or another field.

Tailoring Competence to the Work Context

If a product team is focused on engineering, a Scrum Master should have a grasp of technical practices to help guide discussions.
If the team is focused on finance, the Scrum Master should understand the nuances of accounting to coach the team effectively.

This understanding helps Scrum Masters participate in conversations and contribute meaningfully to the team’s progress.

Moving Forward: Hiring Competent People & Promoting from Within

1. The Path to Competence

The journey from where we are—filled with roles occupied by those who aren’t fully equipped—to where we want to be is clear:

Stop hiring people who lack the necessary skills.
Start promoting individuals from within who have demonstrated the ability to grow.
Lead by example, showing what competence looks like in practice.

2. The Role of Scrum Masters as Leaders & Lifelong Learners

Scrum Masters should not only facilitate team activities but also embody a commitment to lifelong learning. Here’s what that looks like:

Embracing new challenges with curiosity and determination.
Demonstrating leadership by guiding the team through continuous improvement.
Setting the tone for the organization, showing that learning and growth are valued.

When an organization promotes a capable person, it sends a positive message to others. Conversely, promoting someone who lacks competence can discourage those who are truly capable from stepping up. 📉

The Impact of Promoting Incompetence: Why It Hurts Organizations

One of my favorite books, The Ideal Team Player, delves into the qualities and behaviors that organizations should look for when hiring and promoting. When we lower the bar for filling roles, we risk:

Diminishing morale among talented team members.
Undermining the organization’s values and commitment to excellence.
Missing out on innovation that comes from hiring and promoting the right people.

Building a Culture of Capability and Value Delivery

Key Takeaways for Organizations

To create a thriving, capable organization, focus on the following:

Hire for competence, not just to fill roles.
Invest in continuous learning for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and team members.
Promote from within to build leaders who understand the context of your work.
Encourage a culture where learning is valued and mistakes are seen as opportunities for growth. 🌱

Final Thoughts

By shifting the focus beyond just “Agile” and prioritizing capability, learning, and leadership, organizations can unlock new levels of effectiveness. It’s time to move away from the mechanical and embrace a mindset that truly drives value delivery for our customers.

Ready to build a team that thrives? Start with competence, context, and a commitment to continuous improvement. 🚀

By focusing on the how rather than just the what, we can create an environment where Scrum Masters lead with insight, teams collaborate effectively, and businesses deliver true value. That’s what agility is really about—being ready for anything, with the right people at the helm. 🌟

We need to change the way we focus and what we focus on within the context of these organisational strategies, business strategies, technical strategies that we need to be able to adapt to complex work. Right? Did you see how much I try to avoid the word agile there? Don’t think about it as agile; think about it as increasing our capability, maximising our value, and maximising our effectiveness to deliver that. The name, the moniker, is irrelevant because what we’ve ended up with by a focus on the mechanical elements is we’ve ended up with backlog barons and scrum stumblers. That’s product owners and scrum masters that have no capability to do what they’re being asked to do, and they’re pushed into positions of just not knowing what they’re doing.

So what we can do, what I’ve got a couple of previous videos on this topic on the detail of what went wrong, but a summary is that demand has outstripped supply of competent people, and businesses have reduced the bar in order to meet the open positions. So we’ve got a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re doing. There’s not been a focus on continuous learning and hiring people for that mentality, especially for the specific positions like product owner and scrum master, and engineers and lead engineers, to be able to have the body of people within our organisation, the culture and outlook within our organisation that moves us in that direction.

So that’s where we are now, and we need to look at where we’re going to go next and how we’re going to get there. The first thing we need to do is fix the hiring practices. We need to stop hiring people who have no competence for the thing that we’re trying to do. It’s absolutely okay to bring in interns and bring in people at the lower levels, but we want to be bringing people in at the lower levels in the work context. Right? So think of it as, I’m trying to think how to describe this. The way I think, if we want good leaders in our organisation who are able to lead products or lead people, right, I’m thinking of them as two separate things because product management is leading the product, and I don’t know what the name of the other one is; leadership is leading the people.

Then we need people who understand the context that we’re working in to be those people leaders. So where do they come from? Well, usually they’ve done the job, right? They’ve done something within the context. I work with some great scrum masters. By the way, this is why I’m saying this. I’m not talking about being a software engineer; I’m not talking about writing code. I’m not expecting a scrum master to be able to write code. Right? I know scrum masters well. I might roll that back a smidge, but I know scrum masters who have never been coders, who have perhaps been a business analyst or perhaps been a tester, right? Or perhaps been some other context within a team, and they’ve demonstrated, they’ve worked hard, they’ve brought in and learned the philosophies around enabling a team to be effective. They’ve made suggestions that panned out within the context of their team. Their team has noticed that they quite often make suggestions that pan out and help them, and the team has promoted them to scrum master. That’s the way I think about how you become a scrum master, right? You don’t get hired into that position; the team hires you into that. The team enables you to pick up that accountability, however you want to describe it. The team get together and go, “Yeah, Bob is really good at this stuff. Bob, can you help coach us to do more stuff, to do more capability?” They’ve already gained the respect of the team by participating in the team, participating in the work that the team is doing. So the team knows they understand the work, and they’re making suggestions on how we do our boards or different practices or different engineering things we can bring in to understand that.

So does somebody who’s a scrum master need to be able to code? I would say no more than anyone needs to be able to code, which is yes. I don’t know if you’ve looked at the international computer driver’s licence, but at most of the levels, the coding’s pretty basic. Being able to understand those logical constructs because then you can participate in conversations, you can participate in understandings like what architectures, what patterns and practices are valuable within the context of a particular product. If a product’s big focus is engineering, a scrum master needs to understand the patterns and practices of engineering. If the focus of the doers is on accounting, right, then the scrum master needs to understand the patterns and practices of accounting so that they can help coach that group of people towards better accounting, better organisation of that work, better planning, better all of the just making things more effective.

So that’s where we need to get to. So we’ve got where we are right now, which is lots of incompetent people doing the roles, and we’ve got where we want to get to, which is lots of competent people doing the roles. For me, it’s fairly logical how we make that transition: we stop hiring people that can’t do it and start hiring people that can. Primarily, try and promote from within our organisation into those roles and improve the overall capability and lead by example. So this is why we want scrum masters who are supposed to be leaders, right? A scrum master might be a delivery manager; they might be a defined role in your organisation. They might be a delivery manager; they might be a lead developer who picks up the accountability of scrum master. They could be something else, right? But they pick up that accountability, and they are somebody who has those lifelong learning genes. I don’t know how better to describe it. They have that lifelong learning mindset, that lifelong learning philosophy, that I want to understand the world better, and they demonstrate that through leadership. So they lead the team, and they are demonstrating that this is how we want people in our organisation to behave.

Every time an organisation promotes somebody who’s not capable, it tells every other capable person in the organisation that this organisation is not for them. That’s what’s been happening: promoting people through lack of competence and just not having the right people in the right place. There’s a great book, The Ideal Team Player. It’s a great book, and in that book, it talks about the types of behaviours that you want to see in people that you hire. We need to be hiring the right people. We need to be expanding the capability of the teams, of the parts of our organisation, of the product development effort within our organisation to be able to build better products that are more effective and add more value to our customers.

People and Process Organisational Change Change Management Continuous Learning Organisational Culture Technical Leadership Organisational Agility Team Performance Pragmatic Thinking Sociotechnical Systems

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