Can a Scrum Master work in a Startup?
The role of the scrum master in early-stage startups
In the exciting world of startups, a symphony of roles work together to create high-impact solutions. Here’s a quick review.
Front-End Engineers
They are the ones who develop the face of the product. If they were construction workers, they would be building houses, commercial establishments, etc..
Back-End Engineers
They are the ones that make everything work. If they were construction workers, they would be building the necessary infrastructure for the electricity, water, etc. services to work..
Data Engineers
They are like the builders of digital bridges and data highways. As the craftsmen of the infrastructure, they create the pathways on which the data will travel, ensuring that it reaches its destination in an efficient and organized manner.
Machine Learning Engineers
They are like the craftsmen who receive this data at a certain point to apply their scientific knowledge to shape this data and create machine learning models that reveal hidden insights in the form of clusters, predictions, or recommendations.
More technical roles like designer, analyst, data architect, data modeler, DevOps, etc., await their turn in future posts.
In the management sphere we have product managers, project managers, scrum masters among others. And here comes the challenge for the scrum master. According to the official scrum guide, the scrum master serves the scrum team in a number of ways, including:
- Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality.
- Helping the scrum team focus on creating high-value increments that meet the DoD (Definition of Done).
- Causing the removal of impediments to the scrum team’s progress.
- Ensuring that all scrum events take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox.
However, in many organizations (especially startups in the early stages of product development), a scrum master can be a noticeable absence from the team, even when they follow the work cycles by sprints and perform the ceremonies established by this framework (planning, daily meetings, review and retrospective).
In such circumstances, the burden often falls on roles like the Chief Architect, Chief Engineer, Chief Data Scientist, etc. As if they didn’t already have enough responsibilities!
What they say about you having to wear a lot of hats when working at a startup company is true. Although in recent years we have observed that it is no longer the norm to look exclusively for a full stack data scientist, because they are dividing responsibilities into various roles, many times it is a software developer (frontend or backend developer) who, in his quest to meet the requirements, embarks on a journey to learn data engineering, data pipelines, and data architectures.
In this context, the question arises: what would the figure of a scrum master be like in this type of company? Can this role exist? Would he/she wear multiple hats? What tips would you give a scrum master to be successful?
Let me know what you think, leaving your answers in the comments. I will add the best ones in this post.
PS: No scrum masters were harmed during the making of this post :)
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