The current state of Scrum Master roles is, to put it mildly, troubling. Across organizations, there’s a significant, systemic lack of competence in the Scrum Master accountability. This shortfall has grown from the agile boom of the past two decades, creating a demand for Scrum Masters that far outstrips the available supply. As a result, many individuals have transitioned into these roles without the necessary skills or experience to succeed.
The Demand for Scrum Masters Far Outstrips Supply
The explosion of agile practices in the early 2000s led to a rapid increase in demand for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches. This demand came from companies of all sizes, looking to incorporate agile frameworks into their teams and departments. But the supply of truly competent Scrum Masters couldn’t keep pace:
📈 High demand, low supply: Every organization wanted a Scrum Master, but finding skilled individuals was difficult.
💼 Lucrative opportunities: The gap between supply and demand drove up salaries, attracting many people to the role without the required background.
🚪 Entry of unqualified individuals: With the promise of high-paying jobs, many shifted into the Scrum space without relevant experience, sometimes armed only with a two-day course.
Why a Two-Day Course Doesn’t Make You a Scrum Master
Let’s be clear: a two-day Scrum Master course does not make you a qualified Scrum Master. It’s akin to passing your driving test; it means you have a basic understanding, but it doesn’t make you a Formula 1 driver. Mastery takes time, experience, and continuous learning:
🏎️ Experience matters: Just like racing, you can’t jump into the complexities of Scrum and expect to excel without experience.
📚 Lifelong learning: Becoming effective in this role requires a deep understanding of the team’s context and the challenges they face.
🔄 Contextual understanding: The ability to coach teams requires more than theoretical knowledge; it demands practical experience.
The Influx of Unqualified Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches
Over the past 15-20 years, the agile industry has seen many people move into Scrum Master roles with limited competence. They might have completed a short course or attended a coaching class, but these don’t equip them with the necessary skills:
🧑💻 Lack of IT and software experience: Many individuals come from non-IT backgrounds and lack the understanding of the technical environment they are supposed to support.
🚫 Limited coaching skills: While they may know some coaching techniques, this does not translate into the ability to guide teams through complex challenges.
🧠 Gap in organizational understanding: Effective Scrum Masters need to grasp how organizations work, how to foster change, and how to support teams and Product Owners alike.
Training Police Officers in Ghana: A Lesson in Context and Competence
I had the opportunity to train police officers in Ghana, using Scrum as an organizational change mechanism. Here’s what I learned:
👮 Teaching without domain expertise: While I understood Scrum and organizational change, I had no expertise in police work.
🎬 Admitting my limits: When a senior officer asked how to apply Scrum principles directly to police work, I had to be honest—I lacked the depth of knowledge in their specific field.
🔍 Focus on context: This experience underscored that without understanding the context of a team’s work, a Scrum Master can’t effectively guide them. Knowing the framework isn’t enough; one must know the environment in which it’s being applied.
Why Competence in Software Engineering is Crucial for Scrum Masters
For a Scrum Master working with software engineering teams, having a foundational understanding of software development is critical:
🤖 Understanding DevOps principles: It’s vital to grasp modern engineering practices and DevOps methodologies, as they directly impact how teams work.
🛠️ Knowing the tools: A Scrum Master should be familiar with tools like source control, automated builds, and work item tracking.
🧑🏫 Helping teams fill knowledge gaps: For example, I’ve worked with teams that didn’t know how to use source control systems for merging code. This lack of knowledge created inefficiencies and introduced bugs. My technical understanding allowed me to guide them to more effective practices.
The Role of the Scrum Master in Supporting Product Owners
A Scrum Master isn’t just accountable to the team; they also have a critical role in supporting the Product Owner:
🎯 Maximizing value delivery: The Product Owner’s primary job is to maximize the value delivered by the team. A competent Scrum Master helps them do this effectively.
🧠 Understanding modern product practices: This includes hypothesis-driven development, telemetry analysis, and fostering stakeholder relationships.
🔄 Bridging the gap: Many Product Owners come from traditional backgrounds, lacking familiarity with agile practices. The Scrum Master must bridge this gap, guiding them through the nuances of iterative development and continuous improvement.
Organizational Change: The Third Key Responsibility of Scrum Masters
The role of a Scrum Master extends beyond the team and the Product Owner. They also play a vital part in driving organizational change:
🌱 Continuous evolution: It’s not just about transforming an organization—it’s about evolving it. This requires a deep understanding of organizational topologies and dynamics.
🔄 Adapting practices: A Scrum Master must be able to identify effective strategies that suit the unique needs of their organization.
🚀 Championing change: They help organizations experiment with new approaches, refine them through feedback loops, and adapt as necessary.
The Skills and Experience Required for Effective Scrum Masters
An effective Scrum Master is more than a facilitator—they are a leader, a coach, and a mentor. This level of competence requires years of experience:
👴 A seasoned professional: The ideal Scrum Master has been in the trenches with the team, accumulating hands-on experience.
💡 Triple-loop learning: They constantly refine their understanding, adapting their approach to fit new challenges and contexts.
🧑🤝🧑 Building relationships: Over time, a skilled Scrum Master earns the trust of the team, the Product Owner, and the organization as a whole.
A Massive Deficit in Scrum Master Competence
Today, there’s a significant competence deficit in the Scrum Master role, and the data backs this up. For instance, an organization called Scrum Match, which evaluates Scrum Master skills, revealed some concerning statistics:
📊 61% of Scrum Masters shouldn’t be in the role: Many of these individuals have been in the position for over a decade without fully understanding the fundamentals.
📖 38% have never read the Scrum Guide: Shockingly, even some long-tenured Scrum Masters have never read this foundational document.
🔍 Limited understanding: Others have read it but lack a deep comprehension of its principles, leading to ineffective implementation.
Navigating the Industry Correction: Moving Toward Competent Agile
As we face global economic uncertainties, companies are becoming more discerning about their agile practices:
🚫 Incompetent Scrum Masters are being let go: Organizations are cutting costs by releasing unqualified Scrum Masters.
🔍 A shift towards competence: Despite the layoffs, many companies continue to hire—but with a focus on finding truly capable individuals.
🌟 Opportunities for improvement: For those in the role today, this is a chance to deepen their skills, embrace continuous learning, and strive for mastery.
Conclusion: Elevating the Standards of Scrum Mastery
The competence crisis in Scrum Master roles is a reality, but it’s not without solutions. The industry is moving from the wild west of Agile toward an era where competence is king. To succeed as a Scrum Master, you must embrace the journey of continuous learning, develop a deep understanding of the context you’re working in, and commit to becoming a true servant leader.
👉 Key Takeaways:
Invest in your growth beyond certifications.
Build a solid understanding of your team’s domain.
Focus on practical experience and real-world application.
By focusing on these areas, Scrum Masters can elevate their roles, deliver more value, and help their organizations thrive in this new age of agile.
The current state of Scrum Masters in the industry at the moment is pretty terrible. There is a massive systemic lack of competence in the Scrum Master role and the Scrum Master accountability across organisations. I think much of this comes from the boom that we’ve had, the cash cow that we’ve had in the agile world, where the demand for Scrum Masters to help teams, which really wasn’t realised as much before the early noughties, has far outstripped supply.
So we want to have somebody with some kind of competence within this context on every team, in every group, in every department of every company. Whether you’re called a Scrum Master or an Agile Coach or whatever, it’s all the same skill set. Because there’s been a massive demand but very small supply, the price has gone up. And because the price has gone up, all the folks who aren’t even in it, aren’t even in that world of the context of that team, are looking at these very lucrative jobs over here in this other space, and the grass is greener over there.
So let’s go over there. We have lots and lots of people over the last 15, almost 20 years, that have moved into this space to be a Scrum Master or Agile Coach, who largely have no skills whatsoever within the context of the team. Maybe they’ve done a two-day Scrum Master class, which, FYI, does not make you a Scrum Master. Just like passing your driving test doesn’t make you a Formula 1 driver. It just means that you’re hopefully not a danger to everybody on the road.
Hopefully, that doesn’t mean that that’s not true. You’ve got a lifelong learning and experience. You can’t just jump in a Formula 1 car; you can’t just jump in any racing car on any track without some level of skills, training, knowledge, expertise. You can get a track day, but expect there to be limitations on what it is you can do because it takes experience and time to build that experience and understanding of the detail of the world within which you’re coaching and helping teams.
If I was coaching, here’s a great example of a lack of competence. I did a bunch of training, not coaching, but training for police officers in Ghana. They were going to be using Scrum as an organisational change mechanism, not to do their work. We were teaching them Scrum so that they could use Scrum to change as a change mechanism in their organisation. I have competence and can understand organisations and organisational structure through experience, and understand how Scrum can be used to incrementally and iteratively change your organisation and deal with that complexity.
You have a backlog of organisational changes and what cadence you are iterating on them, all those kinds of things. But I have absolutely zero understanding of police work beyond what I see on TV. I have no experience or skills. I can’t say to a police officer, “This is how you should do your job and it will make you more effective.” I can’t do that, and I wouldn’t do that.
When I was teaching the training, I had the head of CID in one of the classes. We did a bunch of classes. The head of CID is, if you’re in the US, it would be the chief of detectives, maybe. I don’t know. The head of detectives, lieutenant for detectives. CID in the UK and the British Empire world is the investigative division. I don’t even know what it stands for. Anyway, he was the head of CID, and he started asking me a bunch of questions about how he could apply the things we were talking about to police work.
I had to say, “Look, I have no knowledge or understanding of what it is you do beyond the movies.” I can imagine that you don’t know how long it’s going to take to solve a case. You have to do a bunch of work. There are some things you always have to do, and there’ll be something different in every case, everything that you do. But you know perhaps what the definition of done is, what the list of things at the end is that you need to have.
It’s great if you can figure out how to leverage some of these practices to help with that, but I can’t help you with that because that’s not my background and expertise. What we’re seeing and have seen over the last 15 to 20 years is loads of people coming into IT. My background is IT; that’s where this stuff kind of spawned from most recently, right? The Agile Manifesto for software development.
They have no background in software, no background in any sort of IT, and they’ve perhaps done a two-day Scrum Master course or perhaps done a coaching class. So they’ve learned to coach, professional coaching experience, and that’s just not good enough to be able to fulfil the accountability of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master has an accountability to help the team be as effective as possible, and they do that through three areas.
They have three sets of accountabilities, as it were. One is the accountability to the team itself. So what can they do to help the team be effective? In order to help a team be effective, you need to understand the context within which the team are working. Whatever that context is, for me, it’s software engineering. If you’re going to be helping a team of software engineers become more effective, you have to understand the practices, the principles of that work so that you can help them.
In the software engineering world, we have modern engineering practices, we have DevOps, we have things like release planning and scaling, and all of those things to do with the actual engineering practices. But you also have stuff you might gain through experience in other areas, like how to do organisational change. That’s not something that maybe you need specific skills for, or conflict management. That’s something that you might learn in your professional coaching.
But that doesn’t remove the need to have that understanding of what the team is working on, what it is they’re doing. For a Scrum Master within that context, within the context of a software team, there would be other things on my list if it was for a different type of work. But for a software team, I would expect them to understand DevOps principles, DevOps practices, understand what it takes to fulfil them, what it looks like when they’re being successful, to understand modern engineering practices.
If the team’s work is building software, you need to understand how to build software in order to help the team be effective at building software. They might not know. I’ve worked with lots of teams all over the world as a DevOps consultant, as an Agile consultant, that have huge gaps in their understanding. One of the biggest ones that I usually use as an example is using source control and understanding branching but not understanding merging.
Not understanding that there are tools within your source control system that allow you to merge code in a mostly automated fashion, right? If there’s no conflict in changes, and then dealing with conflicts. I worked with a team of 30 engineers in an organisation. They’ve been building software for many years. Those lead engineers, there were people who had been building software for many, many years, and they had no idea that there were tools inside of the source control system that allowed you to merge code.
They were doing it manually with Beyond Compare. They were just comparing files and copying across the bits that they wanted, hugely error-prone, huge number of bugs introduced by that kind of mechanism because they weren’t using those tools. If I didn’t know that those tools existed, if I didn’t understand the workflow of source control, regardless of whether you’ve actually used source control or not, although I think if you’re going to be working with software teams, you have to understand how source control works.
You have to understand how automated builds work. You have to understand how work items, the work that you’re doing, can be linked to the code so that you can get more effective understanding of what’s being changed and how it’s being changed and how you’re testing it. That doesn’t require you to have been a software engineer. If you’ve been a tester or you’ve been an analyst on a team and you’ve done those things for many years, you’re going to understand those things.
If you don’t understand those things, you need to learn those things in order to be an effective Scrum Master for a software engineering team. But that’s just one of the three things that a Scrum Master is accountable for. They’re also accountable for services to the Product Owner, not just to the team, but specifically to the Product Owner.
So what does the Product Owner do? The Product Owner maximises the value delivered by the work from the team. One of the Scrum Master’s jobs, roles, accountabilities, things they have to do is they have to be able to enable and help that Product Owner become more effective because that Product Owner might not understand the things that they have to do. They might not understand the processes and practices that are available to them. They might have outdated knowledge.
They might come from a traditional background where we’re not doing fast iterations. While most of the practices can still be used, they need to be modified to allow it to work in the iterative and incremental world of continuous delivery and continuous learning. So how do you help them if you don’t understand what they do? How do you know that they don’t understand hypothesis-driven engineering practices?
If you don’t understand hypothesis-driven engineering practices, how do you know that they should be able to look at the telemetry from the product and understand and use it to help inform the decisions that they’re making? How do you know that they need to be building relationships with people inside of the business and how they build relationships with people inside of the business and how they understand the dynamic of those relationships?
Unless you do, you can’t help them do that. You can’t help them do something that they don’t know or don’t understand how to do already. In my experience, at least in my experience, right, because remember my caveat with everything is I get called by people who need help. In general, Product Owners don’t have the background knowledge, understanding, or experience to know how to maximise the value delivered in the product.
There are absolutely product managers and Product Owners out there who do understand that, absolutely. But they don’t need to call me to come and help them. They don’t come to my Product Owner classes. They don’t come to my product management mentor programmes because they already know that stuff, so they can do it. But if you want to help those people who don’t understand, you need to understand that thing to be able to help teach them, coach them, and mentor them.
And we’re not even done yet because there’s a third thing. The third thing is the organisational, I guess, Lisa Atkins calls it organisational transformational mastery. I usually call it organisational evolutionary mastery because I feel like evolution doesn’t have an end, whereas transformation might have an end. It’s a continuous thing. How do you help the organisation change?
If you don’t understand organisational topologies, if you don’t understand how organisations function and go together, if you don’t understand the options that have been known to be effective within that space for things to try and see whether it works within this particular organisation, if you don’t have that standing, how do you know that something needs to change? How do you know that things can be different?
You’ve got that accountability to the organisation for helping them be effective. When you bring all of that together, you end up with an individual that is quite significantly skilled with lots of experience. They probably have a grey beard because they’ve been around for a while, or grey hair. They have been in the trenches with the team. They’ve worked as a team member.
When I’m thinking about a Scrum Master, I’m thinking about somebody who’s worked as a team member for many years, gained a bunch of experience, helped their team. Their team has realised that they’re helping. They look to them as a leader in that space of effectiveness, and then that grows over time. Not just the team looking to them; the Product Owner looks at them, and the other people in the organisation start looking to them as somebody who can help them be more effective, deliver more value, change the way we do things because they have this understanding of how all of the…
They have a core understanding of the theory, the philosophies, and the principles to be able to apply them within multiple various contexts. But you get that through learning. You get that through experience, not just experience of doing it and trying it, but experience of learning and figuring it out and then seeing whether it works and closing those feedback loops and having that triple-loop learning and changing your worldview and how you can do things.
This is just not that common. There’s a massive deficit at the moment in the level of competence. If you’re interested in how big that deficit is, there’s some data from an organisation called Scrum Match, who review Scrum Master skills. As part of their story, it’s a little bit of a recruitment story, but they review Scrum Master skills.
It’s not just people who are looking for jobs; it’s to get a badge. “I’m this level of Scrum Master.” Some people look at it as a badging. What they found was that 61% of the people that they engaged with, reviewed who were Scrum Masters, already perhaps had been a Scrum Master for 10 years or more. So there were people in that list that were 10 years or more.
61% of them shouldn’t be Scrum Masters. 61% of them, I think it was 38%, I’m going to be a little bit off in the percentages but only by fractions, it was about 38%. I think had never read the Scrum Guide. There were Scrum Masters who had been enrolled for 10 years or more, never read the Scrum Guide.
The rest of that 61% had read the Scrum Guide but kind of, you know, didn’t really understand Scrum that well. I understand Scrum, and I can rudimentarily apply it to organisations. None of those things are good enough to be a Scrum Master. None of those things are good enough to help a product team be more effective.
So it’s absolutely no surprise that as we enter a period of fiscal uncertainty, a global fiscal uncertainty, organisations are looking to reduce their costs, and they’re looking at the capability of the people that they currently have as Scrum Masters, and they’re saying, “This isn’t good enough. These people are not competent.” If you’re not competent, you’re incompetent.
The majority of Scrum Masters in a row today are incompetent. They should not be in that position. They should not be doing that role. The only way organisations have to demonstrate their lack of satisfaction with that is to start getting rid of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches. That’s the position we’re in right now. We’re seeing a massive industry correction. A competence bubble has popped, or an incompetence bubble has popped.
There are loads of good Scrum Masters that have been caught up in the nasty as organisations are divesting themselves. Almost all of these organisations are still hiring Scrum Masters; they’re just being more discerning. I think we’re moving from an era of wild west Agile towards more of an era of competent Agile.
