Armin Mandara opens with something uncomfortable: 61% of scrum masters, according to in-person assessments by Scrum Match, are not fulfilling the accountability of the role. Not a survey. Not a Reddit thread. In-person reviews.
He also quotes Bertrand Meyer from 2014: “The scrum idea of a dedicated scrum master is good for scrum but not appropriate for most projects. Good development requires not just talkers but doers.”
That was more than ten years ago. And the conversation hasn’t moved far enough.Armin’s argument isn’t that scrum masters are useless. It’s that we’ve taught them the wrong things – and then blamed them for the results.
We tell scrum masters their job is to change how people think. The problem? Changing someone’s core attitudes is something trained psychologists struggle with. And yet we expect coaches with no psychology training to do it routinely.
Worse, “they don’t have an agile mindset” has become a convenient excuse – a way of attributing failure to other people’s inner states rather than to the scrum master’s inability to introduce change effectively.
The alternative is behavioral intervention. Not coaching someone to value quality – but asking them to write tests. Not philosophising about collaboration – but designing the conditions where collaboration happens naturally.
Amsterdam Airport in the 1990s is Armin’s illustration: a fly etched into a urinal reduced spillage by 50–80% and cut cleaning costs by 8%. No manifesto. No awareness campaign. A nudge that worked because it targeted behavior, not belief.
As Jerry Sternin put it: it’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.
This one provoked the most pushback at the conference. When two speakers gently suggested scrum masters might benefit from some technical familiarity, the audience reaction was defensive. Not curious. Defensive.
Armin is direct: a scrum master who understands the technical context will always be more effective. Not because they need to write code – but because without that understanding, they can’t assess when to let a technical discussion flow, they lose credibility with developers, and they default to the only tools they have: process, facilitation, and mindset. Which brings us back to antipattern number one.
His recommendation: revisit XP. Much of what we take for granted in the agile world came from Extreme Programming, with its deep focus on engineering practice. Scrum won the framework wars – but arguably for the wrong reasons.
The Scrum Guide says teams are self-managing, meaning they decide internally who does what, when, and how. That’s it. That’s the whole definition.
Somewhere along the way, this got reinterpreted to mean: the team should bring up its own problems, hold itself accountable, and not need me. And the ultimate goal of the scrum master became to make themselves redundant.
Armin thinks this idea needs to go. If your highest achievement is not being needed, you’ll spend your career in a defensive crouch – careful not to take too much ownership, careful not to be too involved, careful not to lead.
The result: a role that makes you feel like a failure when the team needs you, and an impostor when they don’t.
The powerful scrum master, by contrast, contributes expertise, takes ownership, challenges the team, and leads – without becoming a bottleneck or a crutch.
At IBM iX, Armin’s team didn’t just talk about this. They rebranded the role entirely: from Scrum Master to Agile Delivery Lead.
Agile – to be framework-agnostic. Delivery – to signal actual accountability for outcomes. Lead – to make clear that this person doesn’t just support, they lead.
Technical understanding and product skills became requirements, not optional extras. The name change followed the mindset change – not the other way around.
Armin ends not with a takedown but with a defence. Teams genuinely struggle – with culture, quality, accountability, delivery. Companies struggle with building the right things and getting them to market. Scrum masters can help with all of it.
But not by staying harmless. Not by waiting for the team to self-organize. Not by preaching values while avoiding outcomes.
The role has earned its place. It just needs to grow into it.
