If you want to fill a Scrum Master position in your organization, you may find the following interview questions helpful in identifying the right candidate. They are derived from my seventeen years of practical experience with XP as well as Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master, as well as interviewing dozens of Scrum Master candidates on behalf of my clients. This revised set of questions addresses the Scrum Master role.
Given the remarkable results, ChatGPT recently scored in my fictitious interview for a Scrum Master position; I added extra scrutiny to the nature of the questions. While I find ChatGPT a fascinating technology, I want it to fail in this interview challenge.
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The free 73 Scrum Master Interview Questions PDF is not merely listing the questions. I also contains:
Two to three questions from each category will provide more than enough ground for an engaging 60-minute-long conversation with candidates.
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The ebook provides questions and guidance on the range of suitable answers. These should allow an interviewer to dive deep into a candidate’s understanding of Scrum and their agile mindset. However, please note that:
Please find following the revised set of Scrum Master interview questions on the role of a Scrum Master or agile coach, from a principal understanding of the nature of the role to supporting other team members, such as the Product Owner, to liaising with stakeholders.
This set of Scrum Master interview questions focuses on the role of the Scrum Master:
The Agile Manifesto infers people over processes. Isn’t a Scrum Master — whose role is meant to “enforce” the process — therefore a contradiction?
Scrum Masters do not wield any absolute authority but act as servant leaders. The Scrum Team does not report to them. This question is meant to help reveal whether your candidate understands that their role is to lead — as opposed to managing — the team. Asking this question is also likely to show why your candidate is interested in the role of a Scrum Master in the first place.
Acceptable answers should emphasize facilitation and support, for example:
What indicators demonstrate agile practices are working for your organization, and which of these show your efforts are succeeding?
No one can use a standard or general definition of ‘Scrum success’ to measure an organization’s agility. Every organization must develop its own criteria. For example, increasing team velocity is usually not considered a meaningful indicator.
However, although primarily indirect, various indicators may be useful in determining success:
Should a Scrum Master remove impediments on behalf of the Scrum team?
A Scrum Master should not be concerned with removing problems that the Scrum Team can solve themselves, no matter how often this requirement is mentioned in job advertisements. If a Scrum Master acts like a ‘Scrum helicopter parent,’ their team will never become self-organizing.
A Scrum Team must learn to make its own decisions. This necessity almost inevitably results in failures, dead-ends, and other unplanned excursions when the team is learning something new. Consequently, in the beginning, a team will need more guidance than usual from the Scrum Master — and of a different kind than exemplified by drawing offline boards or updating tickets in JIRA. Such guidance should not, however, become an exercise in protective parenting — a team must be allowed to learn from their failures.
That being said, there is one area where the Scrum Master is indeed removing problems on behalf of the team: When the Scrum Team cannot solve the problem by themselves, for example, because the issue is an organizational problem. Now we are talking about “impediments.” Only in this situation the Scrum Master becomes the impediment remover of the Scrum Team.
How should a Scrum Master communicate with a Product Owner?
Communicating honestly and openly is the best way for a Scrum Master to collaborate with the Product Owner. Both must serve as servant leaders without being authoritative, and each depends upon the other working reciprocally for a Scrum team’s success (e. g., accomplishing a Sprint Goal). They are allies in coaching the organization to become and remain agile.
A Product Owner is responsible for providing prompt feedback on product matters, clarifying goals, and ensuring that the entire Scrum team understands the product vision, strategy, business model, existing constraints, and customers’ problems.
A Scrum Master, in return, supports the Product Owner in building a high-value, actionable Product Backlog. To this end, they must facilitate effective collaboration between the Product Owner and the Scrum Team.
Should the Scrum team become involved in the product discovery process, and, if so, how?
There are two principal reasons why a Scrum team should be involved in the product discovery process as early as possible:
This helps significantly with allocating efforts to the right issues, maximizing value for the customer. It also helps mitigate investment risk by maximizing the amount of low-value work not done.
Involving the Developers early in the product discovery process ensures their buy-in and the team’s willingness to participate in all phases of a product’s development. This motivates the team to participate when making changes necessary to accomplish Sprint Goals or Product Goals.
The role of the Product Owner is a bottleneck by design. How do you support the Product Owner so that they can maximize the value of the work of the Scrum team?
This question revisits the previous. Again, your candidate should focus on explaining why involving the Scrum team early in the product discovery process benefits both the Product Owner and the organization.
Additionally, Scrum Masters can effectively support Product Owners by ensuring that the Product Backlog refinement process is continuous and of a high-value regarding the Product Backlog. “Garbage in, garbage out“ does apply to Scrum. Essentially, the Scrum team either wins together or loses together.
How can you ensure that a Scrum team has access to a product’s stakeholders?
When answering this question, your candidate should explain that there is no simple way to ensure access to stakeholders.
For example, in larger organizations, functional silos, budgeting and governance practices, and organizational hierarchies often effectively limit team members’ access to stakeholders. Overcoming this organizational debt, thus building trust among all participants, is a prime objective for the work of Scrum Masters (and Product Owners).
Your candidate should encourage stakeholders to communicate effectively in a transparent, helpful manner. Sprint Reviews are a proper venue for this, and the interaction often promotes better relationships between Scrum teams, different departments, and business units.
How do you promote an agile mindset across departmental boundaries and throughout an organization and, in pursuit of that, what is your strategy when coaching stakeholders not familiar with agile product development?
There are various tactics a Scrum Master can use to engage stakeholders with Scrum, for example:
How would you introduce Scrum to senior executives?
This is a deliberately open question meant to encourage discussion. In answering this question, your candidate should elaborate on how they would support the creation of an agile mindset throughout an organization or, more specifically, how they would create a learning organization that embraces experimentation to identify the best product for its customers.
A good candidate will likely talk about the necessity of ‘selling’ agile to the organization to win the stakeholders’ hearts and minds. They will also point to the need for a high-ranking executive to sponsor the transformation.
At the beginning of a transition, any organization shows inertia to change. To overcome this resistance, executives and stakeholders need to know how Scrum will benefit them before they’re likely to commit. (Read more: The Big Picture of Agile: How to Pitch the Agile Mindset to Stakeholders.)
One practical approach when introducing Scrum to senior executives is to organize workshops for higher management levels. Applying Scrum at the executive level has been successful in the past. Executives, and potentially even key directors, can gain first-hand experience with agile practices if organized as a Scrum team.
There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Good practices need to take into consideration an organization’s culture, size, product maturity, legal and compliance requirements, and the industry it is operating.
You’ve already provided your product’s stakeholders with training in Scrum. After the initial phase of applying the concepts, when the first obstacles are encountered, some of these stakeholders begin to resist continued adoption. What is your strategy for and experience in handling these situations?
This question is meant to encourage an exchange of ideas and lessons learned when overcoming resistance to Scrum within an organization. Familiarity with agile failure patterns common to many organizations will demonstrate your candidate’s experience. (I have published a list of several agile failure patterns.)
Your candidate should also be familiar with the challenge middle managers face in any transition to agile practices. Moving from a command-and-control style (for example, managing people and telling them what to do) to a servant-leadership style — thus abandoning Taylor’s principles — is not for everyone. Concerns of middle managers if they may become redundant when all teams are self-managing need to be acknowledged.
Read more: Why Agile Turns Into Micromanagement.
Scrum has always been a hands-on business, and to be successful in this, a candidate needs to have a passion for getting her hands dirty. While the basic rules are trivial, getting a group of individuals with different backgrounds, levels of engagement, and personal agendas to form and perform as a team, is a complex task. (As always you might say when humans and communication are involved.) And the larger the organization is, the more management level there are, the more likely failure is lurking around the corner.
The Scrum Master interview questions on the Scrum Master role are not necessarily suited to turn an inexperienced interviewer into an agile expert. But in the hands of a seasoned practitioner, they support figuring out, what candidate has been working the agile trenches in the past.
So, go for a pragmatic veteran who has experienced failure in other projects before and the scars to prove it.
Peer Recruiting: How to Hire a Scrum Master in Agile Times
The Scrum Master Salary Report 2022
22 Scrum Master Anti-Patterns from Job Ads
Download the ’82 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Agile Imposters’ ebook for free
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