The Ultimate Scrum Master Job Description

Some time ago I posted a couple of blog posts about Scrum Master/Agile Coaching recruiting, in those blogs I wrote some ideas on how you could interview the candidates, these blogs can be found here. In this blog, I will post a possible Scrum Master job description. I believe this is quite useful for everyone that is looking for ideas on how to write this kind of job description.

In Agile, the Scrum Master is a challenging position as he cares about the team's functionality. Scrum Master is responsible for monitoring the scrum processes and scrum meetings. He increases his team's efficiency, motivates his team, spins, and argues for changes that will ensure quality and timeliness. He ensures the DoD (Definition of done) is being followed. Below you can find a Scrum Master Job Description.

I want to highlight the fact that it was not me who created this description. The original description can be found here. I removed some of the lines that I do not agree. Hope you enjoy it.

Essential Duties:

• Guiding the team and organisation on how to use Agile/Scrum practices and values to delight customers.
• Guiding the team on how to get the most of out self-organisation.
• Guiding the team on self-organising to fill in the intentional gaps left in the Agile/Scrum frameworks.
• Assessing the Scrum Maturity of the team and organisation and coaching the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organisation.
• Removing impediments or guiding the team to remove impediments by finding the right personnel to remove the impediment.
• Building a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged, with an emphasis on healing and problem-solving.
• Facilitating getting the work done without coercion, assigning, or dictating the work.
• Facilitating discussion, decision-making, and conflict resolution.
• Assisting with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information.
• Supporting and educating the Product Owner, especially on grooming and maintaining the product backlog.
• Providing all support to the team using a servant leadership style whenever possible, and leading by example.

Required Skills/Experience:

• Experience in playing the Scrum Master role for at least one year for a software development team that was diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory.  (Adjust based on your necessity)
• Good skills and knowledge of servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment, and increasing transparency.
• Knowledge of various well-documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach(for example: numerous Burndown technologies, various Retrospective formats, handling bugs, etc.).

Preferred Skills/Experience (Any of these is a plus):

• Experience is playing the Scrum Master role for at least two years for a software development team that was diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory. (Adjust based on your necessity)
• Knowledge of other Agile approaches: XP, Kanban, Crystal, FDD, etc.
• Awareness and experience with widely successful Agile techniques: User Stories, ATDD, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Pairing, Automated Testing, and Agile Games.
• Applicable knowledge of the technologies used by the team.
• The experience in applying a wide variety of well-documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach(for example: various Burndown technologies, many Retrospective formats, handling bugs, etc.).
• Excellent communication and mentoring skills.

Some other things you(the job poster) might want to fill in:

• Required education level.
• Required software product development experience (I don't recommend picking a particular development role -- just general software development experience).
• Any other things that you feel are relevant to your project, company, or team culture.

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