r/scrum Mar 28 '23

Advice To Give Starting out as a Scrum Master? - Here's the r/Scrum guide to your first month on the job

193 Upvotes

The purpose of this post

The purpose of this post is to compile a set of recommended practices, approaches and mental model for new scrum masters who are looking for answers on r/scrum. While we are an open community, we find that this question get's asked almost daily and we felt it would be good to create a resource for new scrum masters to find answers. The source of this post is from an article that I wrote in 2022. I have had it vetted by numerous Agile Coaches and seasoned Scrum Masters to improve its value. If you have additional insights please let us know so that we can add them to this article.

Overview

So you’re a day one scrum master and you’ve landed your first job! Congratulations, that’s really exciting! Being a scrum master is super fun and very rewarding, but now that you’ve got the job, where do you start with your new team?

Scrum masters have a lot to learn when they start at a new company. Early on, your job is to establish yourself as a trusted member of the team. Remember, now is definitely not a good time for you to start make changes. Use your first sprint to learn how the team works, get to know what makes each team member tick and what drives them, ask questions about how they work together as a group – then find out where things are working well and where there are problems.

It’s ok to be a “noob”, in fact the act of discovering your team’s strengths and weaknesses can be used to your advantage.

The question "I'm starting my first day as a new scrum master, what should I do?" gets asked time and time again on r/scrum. While there's no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem there are a few core tenants of agile and scrum that offer a good solution. Being an agilist means respecting that each individual’s agile journey is going to be unique. No two teams, or organizations take the same path to agile mastery.

Being a new scrum master means you don’t yet know how things work, but you will get there soon if you trust your agile and scrum mastery. So when starting out as a scrum master and you’re not yet sure for how your team practices scrum and values agile, here are some ways you can begin getting acquainted:

Early on, your job is to establish yourself as a trusted member of the team now is not the time for you to make changes

When you first start with a new team, your number one rule should be to get to know them in their environment. Focus on the team of people’s behavior, not on the process. Don’t change anything right away. Be very cautious and respectful of what you learn as it will help you establish trust with your team when they realize that you care about them as individuals and not just their work product.

For some bonus reading, you may also want to check out this blog post by our head moderator u/damonpoole on why it’s important for scrum masters to develop “Multispectrum Awareness” when observing your team’s behaviors:

https://facilitivity.com/multispectrum-awareness/

Use your first sprint to learn how the team works

As a Scrum Master, it is your job to learn as much about the team as you can. Your goal for your first sprint should be to get a sense for how the team works together, what their strengths are, and a sense as to what improvements they might be open to exploring. This will help you effectively support them in future iterations.

The best way to do this is through frequent conversations with individual team members (ideally all of them) about their tasks and responsibilities. Use these conversations as an opportunity to ask questions about how the person feels about his/her contribution on the project so far: What are they happy with? What would they like to improve? How does this compare with their experiences working on other projects? You’ll probably see some patterns emerge: some people may be happy with their work while others are frustrated or bored by it — this can be helpful information when planning future sprints!

Get to know what makes each team member tick and what drives them

  • You need to get to know each person as individuals, not just as members of the team. Learn their strengths, opportunities and weaknesses. Find out what their chief concerns are and learn how you can help them grow.
  • Get an understanding of their ideas for helping the team grow (even if it’s something that you would never consider).
  • Learn what interests they have outside of work so that you can engage them in conversations about those topics (for example: sports or music). You’ll be surprised at how much more interesting a conversation can become when it includes something that is important to another person than if it remains focused on your own interests only!
  • Ask yourself “What needs does this person have of me as a scrum master?”

Learn your teams existing process for working together

When you’re first getting started with a new team, it’s important to be respectful of their existing processes. It’s a good idea to find out what processes they have in place, and where they keep the backlog for things that need to get done. If the team uses agile tools like JIRA or Pivotal Tracker or Trello (or something else), learn how they use them.

This process is especially important if there are any current projects that need to be completed—so ask your manager or mentor if there are any pressing deadlines or milestones coming up. Remember the team is already in progress on their sprint. The last thing you need to do is to distract them by critiquing their agility.

Ask your team lots of questions and find out what’s working well for them

When you first start with a new team, it’s important that you take the time to ask them questions instead of just telling them what to do. The best way to learn about your team is by asking them what they like about the current process, where it could be improved and how they feel about how you work as a Scrum Master.

Ask specific questions such as:

  • What do you like about the way we do things now?
  • What do you think could be improved?
  • What are some of your biggest challenges?
  • How would you describe the way I should work as a scrum master?

Asking these questions will help get insight into what’s working well for them now, which can then inform future improvements in process or tooling choices made by both parties going forward!

Find out what the last scrum master did well, and not so well

If you’re backfilling for a previous scrum master, it’s important to know what they did so that you can best support your team. It’s also helpful even if you aren’t backfilling because it gives you insight into the job and allows you to best determine how to change things up if necessary.

Ask them what they liked about working with a previous scrum master and any suggestions they may have had on how they could have done better. This way, when someone comes to your asking for help or advice, you will be able to advise them on their specific situation from experience rather than speculation or gut feeling.

Examine how the team is working in comparison to the scrum guide

As a scrum master, you should always be looking for ways to improve the team and its performance. However, when you first start working with a team, it can be all too easy to fall into the trap of telling them what they’re doing wrong. This can lead to people feeling attacked or discouraged and cause them to become defensive. Instead of focusing on what’s wrong with your new team, try focusing on identifying everything they’re doing right while gradually helping them identify their weaknesses over time.

While it may be tempting to jump right in with suggestions and mentoring sessions on how to fix these weaknesses (and yes, this is absolutely appropriate in the future), there are some important factors that will help set up success for everyone involved in this process:

  • Try not to convey any sense of judgement when answering questions about how the team functions at present or what their current issues might be; try not judging yourself either! The goal here is simply gaining clarity so that we can all move forward together toward making our scrum practices better.
  • Don’t make changes without first getting consent from everyone involved; if there are things that seem like an obvious improvement but which haven’t been discussed beforehand then these should probably wait until after our next retrospective meeting before being implemented
  • Better yet, don’t change a thing… just listen and observe!

Get to know the people outside of your scrum team

One of your major responsibilities as a scrum master is to help your team be effective and successful. One way you can do this is by learning about the people and the external forces that affect your team’s ability to succeed. You may already know who works on your team, but it’s important to learn who they interact with other teams on a regular basis, who their leaders are, which stakeholders they support, who often causes them distraction or loss of focus when getting work done, etc..

To get started learning about these things:

  • Gather intelligence: Talk with each person on the team individually (one-on-one) after standups or whenever an opportunity presents itself outside of agile events.
  • Ask them questions like “Who helps you guys out? Who do you need help from? Who do we rely upon for support? Who causes problems for us? How would our customers describe us? What makes our work difficult here at [company name]?

Find out where the landmines are hidden

While it is important to figure out who your allies, it is also important to find out where the landmines are that are hidden below the surface within EVERY organization.

  • Who are the people who will be difficult to work with and may have some bias towards Agile and scrum?
  • What are the areas of sensitivity to be aware of?
  • What things should you not even touch with a ten foot pole?
  • What are the hills that others have died valiantly upon and failed at scaling?

Gaining insight to these areas will help you to better navigate the landscape, and know where you’ll need to tread lightly.

If you just can’t resist any longer and have to do something agile..

If you just can’t resist any longer and have to do something agile, then limit yourself to establishing a team working agreement. This document is a living document that details the baseline rules of collaboration, styles of communication, and needs of each individual on your team. If you don’t have one already established in your organization, it’s time to create one! The most effective way I’ve found to create this document is by having everyone participate in small group brainstorming sessions where they write down their thoughts on sticky notes (or index cards). Then we put all of those ideas into one room and talk through them together as a larger group until every idea has been addressed or rejected. This process might be too much work for some teams but if you’re able to make it happen then it will help establish trust between yourself and the team because they’ll feel heard by you and see how much effort goes into making sure everyone gets what they need at work!

Conclusion

Being a scrum master is a lot of fun and can be very rewarding. You don’t need to prove that you’re a superstar though on day one. Don’t be a bull in a china shop, making a mess of the scrum. Don’t be an agile “pointdexter” waving around the scrum guide and telling your team they’re doing it all wrong. Be patient, go slow, and facilitate introspection. In the end, your role is to support the team and help them succeed. You don’t need to be an expert on anything, just a good listener and someone who cares about what they do.


r/scrum 13h ago

Survey on communication in multicultural project teams

2 Upvotes

Hi!
I’m conducting an anonymous survey for my bachelor’s thesis on communication in multicultural project teams. It takes around 8–10 minutes.

I would be very grateful if you could complete the survey or share it with someone who fits the criteria.
https://forms.gle/vRbbCudhSe8rhqDE6

Thank you for your help!


r/scrum 11h ago

Advice Wanted What AI automation you have done to simplify and to improve the quality of work/ process as a scrum master???

0 Upvotes

r/scrum 13h ago

is AI killing the scrum master role or just finally exposing it?

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 3d ago

Why Startup Teams Need Sprint Retrospectives?

2 Upvotes

r/scrum 3d ago

The Agile Project Detective Kit - Part 6

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 5d ago

Passed the scrum PSM I test with 93.8, my tips

19 Upvotes

Hi everyone!

I think i went through every post on this subreddit about the PSM I test and they were all very helpful so i want to share some tips of my own!

This is probably repetitive but read the scrum guide religiously. I printed it out and highlighted and wrote notes then i read it everyday for 2 weeks and i’d do one open assessment question after reading the scrum guide.

The open assessment was very helpful as some of the questions were the exact copy paste, doing it every day helped me go through all the questions (the question bank is small but its important to keep doing it until you feel like you have seen every question)

I also highlighted all the times the word must was included in the the scrum guide

That somehow didn’t feel enough so i bought the scrum uk (15 pounds) question bank and solved all 500 questions over the course of a week. Obviously some of the questions from that site was irrelevant and repetitive but a good part was also very similar to the exam

On the day of the exam, i reread the scrum guide 2-3 times and took it. If you have practiced then the time wont be a problem!

Hope that helps!


r/scrum 5d ago

Advice Wanted Single QA in Agile Team.

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1 Upvotes

r/scrum 5d ago

Product manager who doesn't know how to say no

1 Upvotes

Do you know how to help a product manager stay aligned with the product vision?

He incorporates every customer request into the roadmap, which makes the product more complex and blurs the definition of the offering.

I don't know if there are tools or methods to avoid this.

Thank you for your help.


r/scrum 5d ago

Success Story Made a free scrum poker tool (already 100+ users)

0 Upvotes

Every planning poker tool I tried before this had the same two problems.

  1. The site was littered with Amazon ads
  2. Boring as hell

Either it was locked behind a paywall for basic stuff like voting history or custom card decks, or it was free but plastered in ads that made the whole session feel cheap and distracting mid meeting.

Neither felt right for something this simple.

Funny enough, I didn't actually build this one originally. It started as my ex co-founder's side project that was absorbed into our work, and I ended up taking it on and running with it.

Since then I've kept it lean and free, no paywalls, no ads, no upsells. As to solve the two issues at the top.

It is dead easy to use. Create a room, share the code, vote, reveal, done. No sign up needed to join a session.

It's called Scrum Planning (dot com) if you want to look it up.

Just crossed 100+ weekl teams using it and wanted to share the story rather than just drop a link. Curious what other teams use for estimation and whether you've run into the same pay to vote nonsense I did.


r/scrum 6d ago

Discussion What makes a good icebreaker?

0 Upvotes

This comes with a plug.. please feel free to delete, disregard or give it a try

I’m working on a project with a friend (https://www.sabcdef.com/). It’s daily tier lists for friends - compare and argue etc

We have made a ‘groups’ version designed to be a quick icebreaker or game where everyone makes their tier of the day, and you can discuss about who has dumb opinions about ‘Burger Toppings’, ‘Flags’ or ‘Which Sport is best’ - we’ve enjoyed playing it with family so far, so maybe some of you might like it!

I’d love to know about your experiences of icebreakers in remote work - are they valuable? Do they help the group dynamic at all? What cool icebreakers are out there to try

And if you’d like, you can try the groups feature on https://www.sabcdef.com/ and tell me what you think


r/scrum 6d ago

How to get a TN for a Scrum Master/IT Project Manager

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2 Upvotes

Hi everyone,
I was born in India, bachelors in civil engineering. completed my Master’s in information security systems in the USA, then moved to Canada where I got PR and eventually Canadian citizenship. I’m currently working as a Scrum Master (with 8 years of experience in Agile/Scrum, certifications like
Safe scrum master and leading teams in IT/software development projects).
I’m exploring opportunities to move/work in the US and wanted to check if a Scrum Master role typically qualifies under the TN visa (USMCA) or any other relevant work visa categories.
From what I’ve read, TN visas are for specific professions, and Scrum Master can sometimes fall under categories like Management Consultant, Computer Systems Analyst, or similar – but I’m not sure about the exact match or success rate.
• Has anyone with a similar background (Scrum Master/Agile Coach) successfully gotten a TN visa?
• What NOC/occupation code or job title worked best for reference letters?
• Any tips for the application/interview, especially highlighting my US education and Canadian citizenship?
• Alternatives if TN doesn’t fit?
Appreciate any experiences, advice, or resources! Thanks in advance.


r/scrum 7d ago

SaaS support specialist (6 YOE) trying to break into QA — company is in layoff mode, what's my best move?

0 Upvotes

Hey everyone, looking for some direction here.

I've been a customer support specialist at a SaaS company for a while now, about 6 years total experience in support roles. I've been wanting to transition into QA, but I've hit a wall. My company has been doing layoffs and there's a hiring freeze, so an internal move isn't happening anytime soon. Externally, I'm just not seeing many open QA positions either without having some sort of experience. I've also tried shadowing, but I can only do so much on JIRA and Confluence.

I was thinking about getting my Scrum certification, but I'm honestly not sure if that's the right move or just something to do to feel productive. Is it worth it for QA, or should I be focusing my time elsewhere (learning test automation, SQL, a specific tool like Selenium or Playwright, etc.)?

Would love to hear from anyone who made the support → QA jump, especially in this market. Happy to share my resume if anyone's willing to take a look.

Thanks in advance!


r/scrum 7d ago

Preparing for the PSK I Certification – Any Advice?

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone!

I'm planning to take the PSK I (Professional Scrum with Kanban I) certification from Scrum.org, and I'd appreciate your advice.

Besides the study materials available on the Scrum.org website, are there any other resources you would recommend?

I'd also like to know:

- How difficult is the exam?

- Is it proctored or recorded?

- Is it generally considered easy to pass if you've prepared well?

- Do you have any tips or lessons learned that could help me prepare?

I'd really appreciate any recommendations or experiences you can share. Thank you!


r/scrum 7d ago

Advice Wanted Is PSPO I worth getting?

1 Upvotes

I'm considering getting the PSPO I certification and wanted to hear from people who've actually gone through it. Does it help with job applications or interviews, or is it more of a "nice to have" once you're already in a Product Owner-type role?

Any experiences or advice appreciated — thanks in advance!


r/scrum 8d ago

Question about remote team building / all-hands meetings

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 8d ago

How does your team ensure blockers from daily standups don't get forgotten?

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1 Upvotes

r/scrum 9d ago

How do you keep track of requirement changes that happen outside the Product Backlog?

9 Upvotes

In Scrum, we have the Product Backlog, Sprint Planning, Refinement, Reviews, and Jira or similar tools to manage work. But I've noticed that requirements often change through stakeholder meetings, client demos, Teams/Slack conversations, or emails before they actually make it back into the backlog.

Sometimes it's straightforward, but other times it leads to questions like:

  • "When did we agree to this?"
  • "Was this discussed after Sprint Planning?"
  • "Was this supposed to be in the next sprint or the current one?"

I'm curious how other Scrum teams handle this.

  • Do you rely entirely on Jira?
  • Do you document decisions somewhere else?
  • Does your Product Owner maintain a separate decision log?
  • Or is this just something that naturally comes with good communication?

I'd love to hear what has worked (or not worked) for your teams.


r/scrum 9d ago

Advice To Give The Agile Project Detective Kit - Part 5

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 9d ago

Discussion What would you do when stakeholders stop showing up to Sprint Reviews?

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0 Upvotes

In the last two Sprint Reviews, only the Product Owner and the team attended.

The explanation is that stakeholder calendars are full. But product decisions are still being made — just outside the Review, through private conversations and separate meetings.

At that point, the Sprint Review starts becoming a demo rather than a place for inspection, feedback, and meaningful product discussion.

What would be your first experiment?

  • Speak directly with the missing stakeholders?
  • Build the agenda around decisions and open questions instead of completed work?
  • Invite fewer but more relevant people?
  • Collect feedback asynchronously?
  • Stop the current format and redesign the Review?

I’m especially interested in the first small move you would try, not the perfect long-term solution.

What would you do first?


r/scrum 11d ago

How do you handle executives who bypass the PO and drop a pre-built solution directly onto the sprint backlog?

13 Upvotes

Lately, I've been observing a recurring pattern in our quarterly planning and sprint cycles that is quietly killing the team's ownership. A senior stakeholder or executive will come into a meeting, bypass the actual problem space entirely, and hand over a highly specific, pre-built feature solution. They don't say 'We need to decrease user churn during checkout.' They say 'Build a three-step gamified reward pop-up by next month.' When this happens, the standard reaction from the team or a less experienced Scrum Master is usually compliance. We update Jira, we estimate the story points, and we ask 'When do you need this by?' The immediate cost is obvious: the team stops thinking strategically. They stop looking at data, they stop validating assumptions, and they turn into a feature factory. They are executing blind orders. If the feature fails to move the needle after launch, the executive blames development for 'slow delivery' or 'poor quality,' while the team blames the executive for a bad idea. Nobody wins. I've been experimenting with shifting our phrasing during these exact intervention moments to protect the team's strategic mindset without coming across as obstructive or overly dogmatic about scrum rules. Instead of arguing about sprint capacity or backlog ownership, I've started using a specific pivot line: 'If we deliver this exact interface pattern tomorrow, what is the primary business metric we expect to shift first?' This does two things immediately. First, it forces the stakeholder out of solution-mode and back into business-value-mode. Second, it gives the Product Owner the opening they need to suggest alternative, cheaper hypotheses to hit that same metric target. I'm curious how other practitioners handle this structural pressure. How do you coach your Product Owners to intercept these top-down feature drops before they crystallize into a strict mandate? What are your go-to phrases or alignment frameworks when dealing with aggressive, solution-oriented executives?


r/scrum 10d ago

How do Scrum Masters practise difficult conversations before having them for real?

0 Upvotes

Scrum Masters are often expected to handle difficult situations calmly, but most of us learn these skills during the actual conversation.

For example:

  • pushing back when a stakeholder adds work mid-Sprint
  • addressing someone who dominates every retrospective
  • challenging an unrealistic deadline
  • giving difficult feedback to a Product Owner

I’m exploring a small roleplay-based prototype where Scrum Masters can practise these situations with an AI character and receive feedback afterwards.

Before developing it further, I’m curious:

Would you actually use something like this, or does roleplaying workplace conversations feel too artificial?

How do you currently prepare for these situations?


r/scrum 11d ago

I created a free, modern, open-source Planit Poker alternative

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 11d ago

Free Planning Poker app seeks for feedback

0 Upvotes

Hey community!

I’ve created another one planning poker app: free, online, no ads, no sign up. only Fibonacci scale available. supports ui in deferent languages.

Link: poker.serbito.rs

Any feedback is very welcome.

Will be happy to see you are using it, like I use it daily with my teams


r/scrum 12d ago

Agile Sprint Capacity Calculator — Free Tool for IT Project Managers

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jcorcione.com
0 Upvotes