This is the most commonly asked question by the people who want to get into the Scrum Master role. Let us take a scenario of a “Sports Coach” of a sport like cricket or football. What will be the career path of that coach? 

The “Beginner” Scrum Master: 

When a person starts the Scrum Master career, it takes at least an year or two to understand the role by working with one team and the Product Owner of that team. This is a critical part of the future career, here you will understand the common challenges of Scrum Master and how to handle them by experiencing them. It also helps to gain deep insights of understanding the leaders whom you work with and the organizational culture.

The “Saviour” Scrum Master:

It is natural to look for more challenging assignments once you have worked with one team. Here you may explore to work with an additional team while you spend little less time with your existing team because they might have become more self-managed and able to work on their own. You may take up a new team and spend your time with the new team. Remember, you are not ignoring your old team at all, you still meet them time to time and give them assurance of you being there for any help.

You may also take up more complex projects which are critical for the Organization and may be time sensitive so that your experience as Scrum Master on that project will certainly be value add. Working on such projects will enhance your learning and experience as Scrum Master.

The “Mentor” Scrum Master:

Once you gain deeper insights of working with one team and Product owner, and gained experience of Scru implementation at the team level, you can choose to move to a Mentor role. In this role you will be working with beginner Scrum masters to mentor them and help them in starting their career as Scrum Masters.

Some organizations name this role as “Agile Coach”, who not only works with Scrum Masters, but also helps other supporting functions such as HR teams, Admin Teams, Facilities and Infrastructure teams to transform into Agile and Scrum or Kanban way of working. Your experience helps these teams to initiate their Agile journey with your support. 

Transforming as Product Owner:

Once after having good understanding and experience of Scrum, and also having gained some domain experience on the projects where you have worked as Scrum Master, you can choose to shift to Product Owner role. However, you need to be careful here, it is a complete role shift and not you are playing both Scrum Master and the Product Owner roles. You will shift your focus from Process and People to the Product side during this transformation. In order to succeed in this transformation, you need to invest in learning such as User research techniques, market analysis, working with users, marketing and sales teams, empathizing with users to understand their needs. Your Scrum experience will be an added advantage to manage the Product Backlog and involve in Scrum Events effectively.

Migrating into Leadership Roles:

As you work as Scrum Master in the above mentioned capacities, you will have gained a few years of experience. By then, you would have worked with different teams, different organizational leaders, through which you would have gained a great amount of leadership thinking and experience. As the Scrum Master role itself is a Servant (True) Leader, you may opt to get into the leadership roles in the Organization. These roles including engineering managers, Director of a group of Development teams, etc.

How to shape your career to grow continuously in the Scrum Master Role?

  • Gain experience in multiple frameworks/practices such as Kanban, DevOps
  • Get hands on experience on different Agile tools such as JIRA, VersionOne
  • Understand critical engineering practices such as TDD, BDD, and Refactoring etc
  • Dig deep into human psychology, Systems thinking, Neuro sciences, and lean thinking
  • Improve your skills on: coaching, mentoring, facilitation, conflict resolution techniques

Reference URL: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/the-career-path-of-a-scrum-master