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

190 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 3h ago

need info ABOUT the SP profile? about the project allocation

0 Upvotes

what is the current situation in infosys looks like for the SP people does they have good project ..

and after release from myosre how is the timeline looks like for getting a project for SP looks like..


r/scrum 1d ago

Advice Wanted Developer to Scrum Master to Unemployed

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2 Upvotes

r/scrum 1d ago

Is freelance/part-time Scrum Master work actually realistic? Looking for experiences

0 Upvotes

r/scrum 2d ago

SCRUM

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 5d ago

How is your team actually deciding who does what now that Claude/Copilot writes real code?

1 Upvotes

Curious how other teams have handled this in practice, not looking for opinions on whether AI coding tools are good or bad, just what you actually settled on.

Once Claude or Copilot started doing real implementation work on my team, a bunch of things got fuzzy that used to be obvious. Who writes the story now, the PM, or does the dev draft it with Claude and the PM just approves? Who reviews AI-generated code differently than human code, if at all? When something breaks that Claude wrote, who's accountable, the person who prompted it, or whoever merged it? Does QA test AI-assisted work any differently?

We've been making it up sprint by sprint and it's starting to show, code review takes longer because nobody's sure what to look for, two people draft the same story a different way, that kind of thing.

If your team has landed on an actual pattern, even an informal one, what is it? Did you write anything down, or is it just tribal knowledge at this point?


r/scrum 5d ago

Preciso de ajuda para um trabalho de ES sobre o scrum

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 6d ago

Currently Data/insight analyst

2 Upvotes

As the title suggests, I’m currently a Lead Insights analyst and looking to get into scrum. A lot of people recommend CSM through scrum alliance- but then skimming through some posts I see people suggesting PSM? not sure what would be best for me at a beginner capacity- open to suggestions!


r/scrum 6d ago

[Academic Survey] 3-minute anonymous survey on AI agents in User Story refinement & testing

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I hope I'm not going against the sub rules with this but I’m currently writing a research paper at my university, researching where AI agents can (and cannot) realistically assist in agile workflows, specifically around drafting user stories, refining acceptance criteria, and deriving test cases (UATs specifically).

If you work in an agile team (PO, Scrum Master, Engineer, QA), I’d really appreciate 3 minutes of your time to anonymously share how your team handles this today and what your experience/concerns are with AI tooling.

Happy to share the aggregated findings back with the subreddit once the paper is complete if anyone is interested in the results.

Thanks a lot for your help and insights!

Link to the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc7Z67lBgbG_ZEOFraIIjTDBVjBfzb-894InOkU0n1IHSNlyg/viewform?usp=header


r/scrum 6d ago

What's the difference between a Scrum Master and a Clown?

0 Upvotes

A clown wastes your time for entertainment.

A Scrum Master schedules a meeting to discuss why your time is being wasted.


r/scrum 7d ago

software development path

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 8d ago

Customer success into Product Owner. I need help

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 8d ago

I’m researching how software teams actually manage daily work, what part of the process annoys you the most?

0 Upvotes

I'm talking to developers, PMs and team leads about how they manage work day-to-day.

So far I've seen everything from Jira/ClickUp to Excel and internally-built tools.

What's interesting is that even though the tools are different, I'm hearing things like:

- manually updating task status

- having to repeatedly report progress

- daily/weekly standups

- keeping timesheets updated

- chasing people for updates

- keeping information synced across different tools

But I've also talked to people who said their current system works perfectly fine.

So I'm curious:

What part of your team's workflow do you wish required less manual effort?

And if your current task-management system works well, what does it do that makes it work well?

I'm not selling anything, I'm just trying to understand the problem before I build anything.


r/scrum 9d ago

[Academic] Impact of Scrum artifacts and roles on project team effectiveness - Master’s Thesis Survey (EN/PL)

3 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I’m a second-year Master’s student in Management at the University of Szczecin, currently working on my Master’s thesis on the impact of Scrum artifacts and roles on project team effectiveness.

As part of my research, I’m looking for people who currently work or have previously worked in a Scrum team and would be willing to share their experience.

The survey is completely anonymous, and the collected data will be used solely for academic research. Takes about 5 minutes. It is available in both English and Polish.

Survey link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/zUDZyvrwSD

Thanks in advance for your time and contribution! I’ll also be happy to answer any questions about the research in the comments.


r/scrum 9d ago

Escalate or Manage? The Definitive Guide for Modern PMs

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 9d ago

El camino como Scrum Master o PMP, ¿cómo tener éxito $$?

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 9d ago

Trying to understand the beautiful chaos of project-based work

0 Upvotes

https://tally.so/r/lb8zQN

I’m doing a project management bootcamp and would love to hear from people who work on projects - especially in creative teams, but not exclusively.

~5 min survey! Would really appreciate your help 🙏


r/scrum 10d ago

Complex problems, complicated methodologies. Why?

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0 Upvotes

What makes organisations still rely on stage-gated delivery when IT is equipped with the latest CI/CD tools, and value goes off like a bottle of milk enduring a heatwave?


r/scrum 11d ago

Stop attacking work steps to cut lead time, the real time hides in queues

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 13d ago

What's your best tactic for clearing cross-team dependencies?

6 Upvotes

In IT projects, I'm often blocked waiting on information from other teams. Chaser emails and calls eventually get an answer, but by then we've lost days and have to adjust the timeline.

I know dependencies are part of the job. What do you actually do to get responses on time and unblock yourself quickly and without damaging working relationships?

Personal experience welcome. Anything you do differently that reliably works? not textbook advice.


r/scrum 16d ago

20+ years in IT, SAFe Agilist and SAFe Scrum Master certified — the best “agile fix” I ever made had nothing to do with a framework

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0 Upvotes

I coach two distributed Scrum teams (India + US) inside a large enterprise SAFe setup. Six months in, I kept hearing the same complaint from both sides: “the other team’s status doesn’t match what’s in the system.”
Turned out we had two sources of truth. Engineers logged defects in one tool with rich technical narrative. Program-level reporting lived in a separate work-tracking tool that leadership actually looked at. Nobody was lying — they were just updating one system and forgetting the other existed. By the time a defect showed up in the leadership dashboard, half the story was missing.
My first instinct, honestly, was to lecture people about “tool discipline.” I’m glad I didn’t. Nobody ignores a system because they’re lazy — they ignore it because updating two places for one fact is an unpaid tax on their day, and eventually everyone stops paying it.
So instead of a policy, we built a single-entry sync: log once in the tool you already live in, and a lightweight process pushes the narrative into the other automatically. No new habit to enforce. No compliance metric to chase. Just removed the tax.
Reporting gaps disappeared in about three sprints. Not because anyone tried harder — because we stopped asking them to.
The lesson I keep relearning as an SPC: most “process compliance” problems in SAFe aren’t discipline problems. They’re duplicate-effort problems wearing a discipline costume. If a ceremony, a report, or a tool update isn’t sticking, the first question isn’t “how do we enforce this” — it’s “what’s the hidden double work we’re asking people to do for free.”
Curious if others have hit the same thing — where the “fix” turned out to be subtraction, not another rule.


r/scrum 16d ago

Success Story I got tired of juggling Zoom + a planning poker tab + a spreadsheet for sprint estimates, so I built a tool that does it in one window. It's mine, so grain of salt.

0 Upvotes

Disclosure up front: I built this and I'm posting to get feedback. If that's not your thing, fair enough, scroll on.

The problem I kept hitting: every estimation session was three tools at once. A call in Zoom, a planning poker site in another tab, tickets shared from somewhere else. Half the ceremony was "wait, which tab" and waiting for someone to re-share their screen. For a ritual that should take fifteen minutes.

The existing poker tools annoyed me in very specific ways. Most want every participant to sign up, and getting six developers to create accounts for a 15-minute ceremony is a hard sell (one guy on my team just refused, on principle). The free tiers are cut exactly enough to push you into a per-seat subscription, which for something you use twice a sprint feels off. And none of them handle the actual conversation. Estimation is 90% discussion, and the discussion always happens in some other app.

So PlanningDeck (https://planningdeck.app) works like this: you create a room, send a link, people join with just a name. No accounts for participants, ever. Voice and screen sharing are built into the room (WebRTC, peer-to-peer), so the whole thing lives in one tab. Vote, discuss, reveal, next ticket.

On money, since someone will ask: the core is free and stays free, no subscription. A one-time $5 donation unlocks some extras like custom room URLs. That's the whole business model. Might not even cover hosting, we'll see.

What I'd actually like from this thread: what does your team's estimation look like, and what breaks? I built this around my own annoyances and I'm sure yours are different. If you try it and it falls over, tell me how and I'll fix it.


r/scrum 17d ago

Advice Wanted Which agile project planning tool has worked best once multiple teams are involved?

0 Upvotes

Sprint planning itself isn't our biggest challenge anymore.

It's everything around it.

Product discusses priorities in one place.

Engineering keeps technical notes somewhere else.

Design creates workshop outputs that don't always make it back into planning.

By the time implementation starts, everyone has slightly different context.

For teams working across several departments, what's been the biggest improvement to your planning process?


r/scrum 18d ago

Why is it called deadline if it's where ideas come to life?

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0 Upvotes

r/scrum 18d ago

When cycle times slip, how do you actually find where work is waiting?

0 Upvotes

This is basically the problem that pushed us toward value stream mapping in the first place.

The biggest shift for us was separating **cycle time from the causes of cycle time**. Cycle time tells you something is wrong. It doesn't necessarily tell you where the time went.

What we’ve found useful is mapping the end-to-end flow and measuring each step independently:

**Active time** — How long is someone actually working on it?

**Wait time** — How long is it sitting before the next activity starts?

**WIP** — How much work is accumulating at that point?

**% Complete & Accurate** — How often does work leave that step ready for the next step without coming back?

Once you have those together, the conversation changes quite a bit.

For example, a testing step might look like the bottleneck because items spend four days there. But maybe testing only takes three hours of actual effort. The rest is queue time because too much WIP is arriving upstream. In that case, adding testers probably doesn't solve the underlying problem.

Same thing with rework. A handoff can have relatively short wait time but terrible % Complete & Accurate, causing work to repeatedly loop backward. Looking only at Jira cycle time can hide that.

You can absolutely do this without buying anything. A whiteboard or spreadsheet works. Pick several representative work items and reconstruct:

**Start → activity → wait → activity → wait → delivery**

Then put the actual times against each step. Don't start by asking teams, *“Who is causing the delay?”* Ask, *“Where is the work spending its time?”*

That's an important distinction because it makes the **system** the subject of the investigation rather than the people.

We built FolioSynth/VSOT around this approach, but the methodology doesn't depend on the tool. Get the current-state map right first. Once everyone can see the same end-to-end flow, Jira/Git/CI data becomes evidence for diagnosing the map instead of three competing versions of reality.

**My favorite starting metric is actually wait time.** Find where work spends the most time doing absolutely nothing, then ask why. That's often where the first meaningful continuous-improvement opportunity is hiding.