Hi guys, Anatoly from Define Agile here again. Today we’re talking about three questions you can ask a Scrum Master to understand if he/she is a good fit.
Question #1: What was your worst day at work?
You will tell me, “Anatoly, how does it relates to a Scrum Master?” Okay, let me explain. First of all, Scrum Master is a person who brings Agile into an organization, usually helps organization to transform to Agile. When you work with a constant change and tasked with transformation you deal with lots of conflicts and stress. So if a person doesn’t have enough experience dealing with the high stress situation, it will be very hard for this person to be successful at the job.
I find that people who tell me that they had a really bad time at work and then they were able to overcome it and they still love this work, those are the people that I want to see next to me working as Scrum Masters. If people didn’t have any major stressful change-related experiences in their career yet, I might find that they don’t have enough experience for them to join my team.
Question #2: Tell me the difference between Kanban and Scrum, and when you should use one or the other.
You’ll tell me again, “Anatoly, why would a Scrum Master know about Kanban? Why should he/she care?” You care for the sole reason that the Scrum Master needs to be a well-rounded person who looks around and understands all the other frameworks that are there and makes sure that the Scrum Master can make an educated decision which one to choose. So if a Scrum Master always works in his/her small box of Scrum and not looking around what is happening in the industry, I don’t think he’s the right person.
Question #3: What was the change that you introduced to the team and how did you do that?
This is very important, because the Scrum Master comes to the team and often introduces lots of things that the Scrum Master thinks is right. If you don’t introduce them well, if you force something on people, it won’t work and then you won’t have any good relationship with your team. The Scrum Master is there to support the team, to advice things, and a good Scrum Master should be able to explain to you how he made sure that everyone understood that the change is good and how he rallied people around the change and made sure they implement in such a way that everyone is happy.
These are my three questions I usually ask every Scrum Master.