We know the Scrum Master is a crucial player on new Scrum teams, but what exactly does a Scrum Master do?
A Scrum Master takes on the administrative, coaching and leadership roles that make Scrum development possible.
That means he’ll usually spend his days:
- Facilitating (not participating in) the daily standup
- Helping the team maintain their burndown chart
- Setting up retrospectives, sprint reviews or sprint planning sessions
- Shielding the team from interruptions during the sprint
- Removing obstacles that affect the team
- Walking the product owner through more technical user stories
- Encouraging collaboration between the Scrum Team and the Product Owner
What’s the pathway to becoming a scrum master?
The most linear course to becoming a Scrum Master is through certification.
The certification process teaches the fundamentals of the Scrum framework and helps one become intimate with what the team roles are, what events are, what artifacts and rules are, and other terms and procedures of Scrum.
A certification demonstrates a core knowledge of the Scrum process and how to engage with other scrum practitioners to further continuous improvement.
Due to the exhaustive list of responsibilities that Scrum Masters have, a specific skill set is required in order to be truly effective. This set of essential qualities can be broken up into two categories: hard skills and soft skills.
Hard Skills
- Strong Scrum and Agile training
- Technical familiarity
- Organizational skills
Soft Skills
- Coaching abilities
- Conflict facilitation
- Servant leader
Finding the right Scrum Master can make a world of difference in the success of a development project. Both hard and soft skills come into play here. Scrum Masters must be able to strike a healthy balance in order to be a strong leader.
Here at Upstack, we are interested in remote collaborations with the best Scrum Masters out there. Are you interested?
