Stuff Scrum Masters Do

At dsmAgile2016 Jodi Jones and I led a session titled What do Scrum Masters Really Do? And Do We Need Them?

During the session, we asked the attendees to discuss in small groups the things Scrum Masters do.  Then, Jodi and I shared some experiences we’ve had in different situations in order to distill some lessons about what Scrum Masters do and where they are most effective.  The general gist is that the things Scrum Masters do and whether they are necessary depends on the context.

After sharing our experiences, we asked the teams to revisit their lists and add things which they didn’t put on the first time and cross out things that no longer applied. The resulting sheets are shown below. In some cases, the teams used a different color marker to help differentiate before and after.

You can find the slides to this presentation on SlideShare.

Thanks to everyone who attended our session and and contributed your thoughts about what Scrum Masters do. If you have any thoughts on patterns that you see in the results, please share them in the comments.