Look inside almost any organization that says it uses Scrum and you will find people doing Scrum Master work without the Scrum Master title. Agile Specialist. Delivery Lead. Team Facilitator. Sometimes nobody at all, on paper. The work still needs doing.
That is why one of the most useful changes in the history of the Scrum Guide is also one of the quietest. The 2020 edition stopped talking about roles and responsibilities and started talking about accountabilities. It looks like a small edit. It changes everything.
Accountabilities, not job titles
A role sounds like a job title. An accountability describes work that someone has to own.
Under the old language, people would say, “I’m not the Scrum Master.” Fair enough. But do you remove impediments? Do you facilitate the team’s events? Do you coach the team on how to work together? Then you are doing what a Scrum Master does, whatever your badge says.
This framing removes the excuse. An organization can call the person whatever it likes. What it cannot do is skip the accountabilities and expect Scrum to work. So the real question is not “Do we have a Scrum Master?” It is “Who owns this work, and do they have the time and skills to do it well?”
Far more than two lines on an org chart
A familiar pattern: an organization maps out its Scrum accountabilities. The Developers get a full description. The Product Owner gets a full description. The Scrum Master gets two lines: run the meetings, update the board.
Read the Scrum Guide and the picture flips. The Developers’ accountabilities are focused. The Product Owner’s are focused. The Scrum Master’s list is the longest of the three, because the Scrum Master serves the Scrum Team, the Product Owner, and the wider organization. One practical action plan for Scrum Masters breaks it down into 32 separate things they are accountable for.
People see the slice in front of them, usually the events, and assume that is the job. Even that slice is misunderstood. A Scrum Master should not be running the events. They should be facilitating them, so nobody’s time is wasted, and over time handing some of that facilitation to others on the team so they grow too.
One of the best summaries of the accountability is also one of the simplest: the Scrum Master creates the air the team breathes. You rarely notice air until it is gone.
The four hats, and a fifth
A useful way to see the breadth is the four hats a Scrum Master wears, often in the same day:
- Coach, helping individuals and the team get better at working together.
- Mentor, sharing experience so others can grow into it.
- Facilitator, making events and conversations productive.
- Trainer, teaching Scrum and the thinking behind it.
There is a fifth that rarely makes the slide: protector. The business has the Product Owner, ordering the work to deliver the most value. The Developers need someone in their corner too. Without one, the requests never stop. Can you just do this? What about that? Let’s squeeze in one more thing. Scope creeps, and focus dies.
The Scrum Master is the person who says, “Not right now.” Not no. Not right now. That alone is enough value to justify the accountability.
Then there is a quieter skill: helping people see that the one big thing they asked for is really five different things. You do not need all of it at once. If the team already has 80 percent of what is needed, maybe the rest can wait. Teach a team to question the request and break it down, and everything changes.
No authority, by design
The Scrum Master has no authority over the people on the team. For anyone arriving from project management or team leadership, that can feel like herding cats. Some who struggle with it thrive as Product Owners instead.
Others learn to work with it. One simple habit: carry an index card that says “Ask the team.” When someone asks for a delivery date and the old instinct is to answer on the team’s behalf, the card is a reminder that the answer belongs to the people doing the work. That shift is what lets a team pull work and own it, instead of having it pushed down from above.
“What does a Scrum Master do? We don’t need one.”
The question leaders ask most often is some version of this. Scrum Masters don’t build the product. They don’t write the code. They don’t gather requirements from customers. So what do they do?
One organization had no Scrum Masters at all, because the time was not billable to its client. So it ran an experiment: compare the value delivered by a team with a Scrum Master against a team without one, apples to apples. The result was clear. The Scrum Master more than covered the difference.
Another organization removed its entire agile office. Its sticking point was the year-end appraisal. A delivery lead could point to projects delivered. A Developer could point to completed work. A Product Owner could point to features released. What had the Scrum Master delivered? The answer put forward was simple: compare what each team delivered before it had a Scrum Master with what it delivered after. The difference is what the Scrum Master put in place.
Here is the uncomfortable part. When the numbers came in, about half the teams had tripled their productivity. The other half had gone backwards, because their Scrum Masters did not understand the accountability and fell back on micromanaging. That second half was all leadership needed to conclude that Scrum Masters were optional.
The lesson cuts both ways. A great Scrum Master is arguably the most impactful accountability in Scrum. A poor one feeds the story that the role is a luxury. Too often the Scrum Master is the last one hired and the first one fired: brought in when everything has gone wrong, cut when things are humming and budgets get tight.
Why the job is hard
The work has hard edges, and it helps to name them.
Meetings in a culture that hates meetings. Scrum often gets blamed for adding meetings. The meetings are rarely the real problem. The culture around them is, and the Scrum Master has to help shift that culture first.
Disengaged events. Cameras off, long silences, the unmistakable sense of people multitasking. Most Scrum Masters walk into a new organization expecting to work on this.
Direct conversations. Some coaching can happen as a group, in a Sprint Retrospective. Some cannot. Picking up the phone to the person who is blocking the team is not fun, but getting that impediment cleared is the deliverable.
Defending Scrum. In sky-is-falling environments, every new demand is a reason to derail the Sprint and switch everyone onto something else. Explaining it all again is tiring. It is also lonely. The Scrum Master is often the only person in the organization championing a new way of working.
It does turn around. One VP of Product whose reflex was to throw more people or more money at every problem was eventually brought into the team’s world. His reaction: he had not wanted to see how the sausage was made, but it was enlightening. Before long he was the one telling stakeholders not to hand the team new work in the middle of the Sprint.
What to look for in whoever owns the accountabilities
Whether the title says Scrum Master or something else, look for:
- Knowledge beyond Scrum. A two-day class is a start, not a finish. Great Scrum Masters understand where Scrum and agile came from, including Takeuchi and Nonaka’s “The New New Product Development Game,” along with lean thinking and systems thinking. The framework alone does not make a good Scrum Master.
- A foundation that fuels it. A former developer brings empathy for the Developers and can advocate for them. A former project manager understands what did not work and why. Something has to sit underneath the Scrum knowledge.
- Facilitation skills. These are critical, and they go far beyond keeping a meeting on time.
- Coaching, teaching and mentoring, plus the ability to work with team dynamics and organizational change.
The Scrum Master is sometimes described as the glue that holds everything together. Glue is not quite right, because glue makes things stick. Oil in an engine is closer: the thing that keeps all the parts moving together.
Master of Scrum, not master of people
The name itself trips people up. A Scrum Master is not the master of people. A Scrum Master is the master of Scrum. When leaders and the people holding the accountability both understand that, things start to look, feel and work differently.
Capacity matters too. A good Scrum Master can serve a couple of teams. A truly great one needs time, and the ideal is one team. Coaching and facilitating well for 20 people across several teams is very hard.
So before asking whether you need a Scrum Master, ask three better questions:
- Who in our teams owns the Scrum Master accountabilities today?
- Do they have the time, skills and support to do them well?
- How would we know, before and after, what difference they make?
Call the person whatever you like. Just make sure someone owns the work. Because a great Scrum Master is the reason the team doesn’t need one in the room.