Once Upon a Time
In the early days of agile development, there were 2 leaders of each agile team. One represented the business while the other represented the developers. Their duties were clearly assigned and it was clear the group of stakeholders they spoke for in the agile development process.
Product Owners are still around and getting hired in droves, but Scrumasters have slowly dimished over time where most companies (at least in the US) don’t even think about hiring them anymore.
Rather than fading into obscurity, many of its responsibilities have been absorbed by Product Owners or Product Managers, leading to a consolidation of leadership within agile teams.
A Slow Transformation
The absorption of the Scrum Master responsibilities into Product Owner or Product Manager roles didn’t happen overnight. This change has been building in the tech industry with the influence of some key evolutions in organizational structures and how agile processes are implemented.
The Growing Overlap of Responsibilities
As agile methods have matured from their early days of the Agile Manifesto, the divide between the Scrum Master and Product Owner sides of leadership in an agile team have blurred.
Originally Scrum Masters were the ones leading agile ceremonies, ensuring the team adhered to best practices, and removed roadblocks for the developers on the team. While this was going on, Product Owners were gathering stakeholder feedback, grooming the backlog, and ensuring alignment between the goals of the business and the actions of the agile development team.
However, organizations began to wonder if they really needed a whole other role just for facilitating agile ceremonies. I mean it can’t be that much work to put together some meetings and facilitate dicussion, so why not have the Product Owners do that too?
As sarcastic as my last sentence is, this system did start to show returns. Suddenly, there was only 1 leader on the agile team for the developers to follow and thus only 1 direction. The team has gone right to the source for all their needs from stakeholder alignment to facilitating agile development.
Cross Functional Teams
Cross functionality and autonomy have become huge drives in high performing teams across industries, but this is especially true in technology. With the velocity of innovation increasing and a more competitive landscape, teams were given more autonomy to keep up with the pace of product development needed to stay with the pack.
This lead teams to massage processes and tailor them for the unique circumstances they were placed in. The Scrum Master role was suddenly divided between the development team members themselves with the Product Owner ensuring agility was maintained in the team.
Agile Maturity and Evolution
This proliferation of agile means companies have gotten pretty comfortable with agile over the years. There’s no longer the need for someone on the team to be dedicated to the distribution of agile knowledge.
In the early days, you had to have Scrum Master to be the subject matter expert on agile development and guide the transition of technical teams from traditional project management to the agile manifesto I linked earlier.
At the same time, organizations pushed to get leaner and faster to improve margins and efficiency. Pressure increased on Product Owners to deliver the features that customer’s demanded so they began to champion the agile development process themselves.
The intense focus on delivering more and more features forced Product Owners to take a more active role in championing the agile development process and get more hands on with the team.
The Magic of DevOps and Continuous Delivery
There used to be a time where Scrum Masters would put together an agile ceremony just to do a release. For the really high performing teams, it happened on the same day every week at the conclusion of the sprint and coordinated all the technical tasks associated with releasing new code before a senior member of the team sat down to do it manually.
For the less high performing teams, these release ceremonies could be months apart.
Now, organizations invest in entire teams who work solely to automate the deployment and testing of software and enable high performing teams to make multiple releases a day if they want to with automated checks at every step of the process.
The release meetings still exist in many places, but a fantastic DevOps team leveraging modern practices makes it feel like litte more than a formality.
Where Scrum Masters Are Today
After all those things working against them, did the role of Scrum Master really die?
Not really. While the traditional role of Scrum Masters may have diminished, its core functions and principles live on and continue to play a crucial role in the success of agile teams.
The essence of the Scrum Master -facilitating collaboration, championing the agile development process, and nurturing the team to work together as a unit- is still very much alive and valued in modern organizations.
Though the title may be less common on job boards today, the skills and mindset of a Scrum Master have been integrated into roles like Agile Coaches, Product Managers, Product Owners, and Technical Product Managers. These roles continue to drive initiatives and foster innovation within software companies.
In this way, the legacy of the Scrum Master endures and will continue to as long as we need to apply agile and adapt to an ever changing business environment.