Hiring: 38 Scrum Master Interview Questions To Avoid Imposters

Demand Creates Supply and the Job Market for Scrum Masters is No Exception

Maybe, “Agile” in general is a management fad and not trend at the moment. But what we can say for sure is that Scrum has become very popular for software development purposes. A seasoned Scrum master is nowadays in high demand. And that demand causes the market-entry of new professionals from other project management branches, probably believing that reading one or two Scrum books will sufficient. 

If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 38 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. There are derived from my ten 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.

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38 Scrum Master Interview Questions

Scrum is not a methodology, but a framework. There are no rules that apply to each and every scenario, just best practices that have worked in other organizations before. Hence, you have to figure out on your own what is working for your organization–which is a process, not a destination. 

So, the role of the Scrum master or agile coach in my understanding is primarily about leadership and coaching, but not about management. And most definitely, the Scrum Master role is not about “process enforcement”. Which is also the reason, that the repository contains to a large part questions that are addressing a candidate’s soft skills.

The PDF contains additional background and contextual information, how the following set of questions can to be interpreted. I am currently also working on a new edition of the PDF, that will include guidance on desired or acceptable ranges of answers for each question. The questions themselves are grouped into five categories.

1. The role of the Scrum master:

   1. The Agile Manifesto says "People over processes". Isn't the Scrum master – a role to enforce "the process" – therefore a contradiction?
   2. What are good indicators that "Agile" is working in your organization, that your work is successful?
   3. Are there typical metrics that you would track? And if so, which metrics would you track and for what purpose?
   4. Your team's performance is constantly not meeting commitments and its velocity is very volatile. What are possible reasons for that? And how would you address those issues?
   5. Shall the Scrum team become involved in the product discovery process as well, and if so, how?
   6. The Product owner role is a bottleneck by design. How can you support the Product owner so that she can be the value maximizer?How do you ensure that the Scrum team has access to the stakeholders?
   7. How do you spread an agile mindset in the company across different departments and what is your strategy to coach these non-IT stakeholders?
   8. How do you introduce Scrum to senior executives?
   9. You already performed Scrum training to stakeholders. After an initial phase of trying to apply the concepts, when first obstacles/hurdles are encountered, you see that these colleagues build serious resistance in continuing with Scrum adoption. What are your strategy/experience to handle such situations?

2. Product backlog grooming and estimation:

   1. The Product owner of your team normally turns stakeholder requirement documents into tickets and asks to estimate them. Are you fine with that procedure?
   2. What kind of information would you require from the Product owner to provide the team with an update on the product and market situation?
   3. Who shall be writing user stories?
   4. How shall a good user story look like? What is it structure?
   5. What should a "Definition of Ready" comprise of?
   6. Why aren't user stories simply estimated in man-hours?
   7. The Product owner of your Scrum team tends to add ideas of all kind to the backlog to continue working on them at a later stage. Over time, this has lead to over 200 tickets in various stages. What is your take on that: Can the Scrum team work on 200 tickets?

3. Sprint planning:

   1. How can you as a Scrum Master contribute to the sprint planning in a way that the team is really working on the most valuable user stories?
   2. On what metrics would you base the assessment of the value of a user story and what metrics would be not acceptable?
   3. How do you facilitate the user story picking progress in a way that the most valuable stories are chosen without overruling the team's prerogative to define the team's commitment?
   4. How much capacity would consider to be adequate for refactoring, fixing important bugs, exploring new technologies or ideas?
   5. How do you deal with a Product owner that assigns user stories or tasks to individual team members?
   6. How do you deal with cherry picking tasks by team members?
   7. A user story is lacking the final designs, but the design department promises to deliver on day #2 of the upcoming sprint. The product owner of your Scrum team is fine with that and pushed to have the user story in the sprint backlog. What is your take?
   8. A member of the Scrum team does not want to participate in the sprint planning meetings but considers them a waste of time. How do you deal with that attitude?

4. Standups & daily scrum:

   1. Would you recommend standups for all teams no matter their size or experience level?
   2. Do you expect experienced team members to wait until the next standup to ask for help with an impediment?
   3. How do you handle team members that "lead" standups, turning them into a reporting session for them?
   4. How do you handle team members that consider standups to be a waste of time and therefore are either late, uncooperative or do not attend at all?
   5. The standups of your Scrum team are not attended by any stakeholder. How do you change that?
   6. How do you approach standups with distributed teams?
   7. Can you draw a draft of an offline Kanban board for a Scrum team right now?

5. Retrospectives:

   1. Who shall participate in the retrospective: just the Scrum team or also the Product owner?
   2. Do you check the team health in a retrospective or isn't that necessary? If so, how would you do it?
   3. What retrospective formats have you been using in the past?How can you prevent boredom at retrospectives?
   4. A team is always picking reasonable action items, but is later not delivering on them. How do you handle this habit?
   5. How do you recommend to follow up on actions items?

For each category, there is not just a set of questions but also background information on why the questions are useful in the process.

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How to Use the Scrum Master Interview Questions

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 is involved.) And the larger the organization is, the more management level there are, the more likely failure is lurking around the corner. 

The questions 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 actually been working the agile trenches in the past and who’s more likely to be an imposter.

So, go for a pragmatic veteran who has experienced failure in other projects before and the scars to prove it. Last, but not least: Being a “Certified Scrum Master” – or having any other certification of a similar nature – does not guarantee success.