Scrum master and Product Owner are both roles where, if I’d never seen someone do them at a high level of competency, I’d question whether they were necessary at all.

Scrum master: One time I was having an argument with a couple engineers because we couldn’t figure out how to implement a particular thing. I said “if K (a senior architect) was here, we’d be able to settle this, but I’m sure his schedule is booked up”. We continued arguing in circles, then suddenly 5 minutes later K materialized out of the ether. Our scrummaster had overheard me saying that, and silently navigated the bureaucracy to get us immediate time with the person we needed, all without being asked, and that unblocked our team. When you have a good scrummaster, they’ll know when it’s OK to bend/break rules and when to enforce them, and they’ll have a “particular set of skills” necessary to keeping the team unblocked.

Product Owner: At my previous job there was a Product Owner named Terry who I continue to hold up as the gold standard. She was totally unafraid to get her hands dirty learning about the part of the system she was stewarding. You could parachute her into a deeply technical area and within a sprint she’d have found the happy paths, the edge cases, the things customers cared about/didn’t, and she’d (this is critical) be in a position to reject stories that legitimately didn’t pass muster. She perfectly walked the difficult line of knowing when to call BS on someone and knowing when to trust their explanation.

When done poorly, scrum masters fall back on rigidly performing ceremonies or processes without considering whether they’re providing value. When done poorly, Product Owners will ask developers “what’s this thing I’m accepting?”, and hopefully the developer did their job, because the PO won’t know if they didn’t and will just rubber stamp the story. The unfortunate thing is that there are a lot of folks in these roles who are simply “performing the motions”, and so the overall reputation of these roles gets tarnished as a result. But when done well, they deliver a lot of value.

Yes when there are really good people, the roles are a godsend to developers who can then focus on writing code rather than negotiating bureaucracies and listening to users and customers.

The problem is the vast majority of times you don't get those good people in these roles and it ends up hindering then helping on average.

In my experience, the most common failure case is that businesses will try to cut costs by either combining the roles, or stretching a PO or scrummaster across multiple teams. I’ve met people who I imagine could be good POs in a different situation, but were scatterbrained from having to manage 3-4 teams’ backlogs.

> She perfectly walked the difficult line of knowing when to call BS on someone and knowing when to trust their explanation.

This, 100%. The best PM I ever worked with had exactly the same skillset.

If your PO / PM can't internalize the technical edges of the product quickly, it's better to have no one in the role.

And that's a difficult ask, because it's extremely hard to reason logically about something you had 12 hours to cram for, with people who are experts at it. But nonetheless, I've known people who can do exactly that!

Unfortunately, there are far fewer of them than open PO / PM job roles...

Isn't that a manager? Why a scrum master, contacting a person doesn't seem to be a scrum master job, rather a manager job

That, and an "Agile Coach". They were the absolute worst people at the last place I worked.

Oh gosh, Agile Coach is definitely the worst. Pure BS. I can get the job of the scrum master, but agile coach? Sorry, we should've a much higher bar for subjecting our engineers to this role.

On a perfect team, where everyone is great at time management, honest about productivity, has superb communication skills, and is enthusiastic/loves their tasks, yes, scrum is dumb. For but for the rest of us, the scrum master handles all the unpleasant organizational crap for the team, and thank god for them.

You can be quite far from perfect and not need it. And they quite commonly can amplify the disfunction in a team with issues.

This is made worse at a lot of companies by hiring the absolutely cheapest person for the role.

Maybe not _need_ it, but it can help in a lot of cases. Though I have seen some cases of active resistance coming from participants, in which case toxic co-workers can really make the experience miserable.

This comes down to companies failing to fire people.

If someone is toxic to a team, they shouldn't remain at that company (much less on that team).

This is one of the roles that I passionately hated in my previous company. No value add, and just wasted time with meetings. If your team, product manager, eng manager has no clue on what they are doing, then yes scrum master's role has a concrete outcome (atleast to keep people busy working). but if any one in the team has any clue on what they are doing, I found no value. Most of the scrum master/agile coaches i interacted with are more married to the whole process of scrum ceremonies rather than the concrete goal they are trying to hit at end of month.

I've had a full time scrum master for, what, 4 months out of 15 years of doing scrum. It made a lot of positive difference to have someone operating on the meta level of the team.

My srcum master seems to think so.

I'm not sure if we need one but I like him and I don't have to pay for it, so why not?

You could in theory help train them learn to do something more useful.

Ironically mine was a QA minion and did the scrum master training as a means to get on the manager track.

Hot take, but if you're doing Scrum you sure do. A good Scrum master can make meetings much more productive.

Alternatively, agree to have an agenda for every meeting and then skip the scrum master.

Your dev team needs meetings? Sounds pretty disorganized.

Our team is productive, manages their time well, and communicates without meetings. Did anyone actually need a meeting, ever?

I have never seen a good scrum master in 20 years then.

I've seen one in 20+ years. The others were all worthless. The net impact of scrum masters on all teams I've been a part of has been negative.