Senior Scrum Master

The Senior Scrum Master has primary responsibility of facilitating the formation, learning and growth of multiple cross-functional delivery teams in developing a Lean/Agile mindset, adopting, and continuously improving practices in their context, and guiding teams and leaders to enable the effective flow of delivery across the end-to-end value stream. As a servant-leader, the Senior Scrum Master plays a key role in planning, facilitation, supporting teams, removing impediments, providing team coaching and mentorship, visualizing the Lean value stream to optimize for flow, and working with other Lean/Agile practitioners to exchange learnings at scale.


Primary Responsibilities and Essential Functions:
Facilitate contextual adoption of the Scrum Framework, including daily scrum, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews & retrospectives, and other related team and intra-team meetings.
Facilitate contextual adoption of Lean Thinking, including visualization and continuous, optimization of delivery flow using the Kanban Method.
Facilitate and participate in scaled events, including cross-team planning, delivery synchronization, and systems-level inspect & adapt.
Foster team collaboration and proactive, open communication.
Encourage an experimental and fail-fast & learn mindset.
Sustain and promote usage of information radiators for the teams and broader organization.
Collect and share transparent team metrics with teams, recommend new metrics for the team's context, and foster continuous improvement conversations using metrics.
Prepare and facilitate quarterly, release, and sprint planning with the product owner and the team.
Guide Feature and Story-level refinement to the Definition of "Ready in preparation for the next quarter and upcoming sprints.
Work with the team and Product Owner/Managers to maintain a healthy backlog and rolling short and mid-term planning for upcoming releases.
Able to put ego to the side and the "desire to control the team by teaching and mentoring increasing levels of self-organizing behavior.
Engage the organization to remove impediments to the team's ability to perform by working closely with the team and stakeholders, including product owners/managers, leadership, and other teams.
Support communication of delivery progress and obstacles with a wide variety of stakeholders; coach product owners/managers to play an active role in stakeholder engagement.
Facilitate cross-team orchestration, tracking and following up with internal and external.
Works with team to co-create and refine team working agreement, definition of "ready , and definition of "done.
Encourages brainstorming, creative thinking, open minds, equal voice, and perspective sharing. Encourages the team to be confident and courageous, thinking outside the box.
Coaches the team on Lean, Agile, and Scrum principles with a goal of continuous improvement. Able to subtly observe team dynamics, recognize strengths and growth opportunities of individual team members and her/himself, and invite team members into coaching conversations to inspire learning and growth.
Create a fun, open, and learning environment, experimenting with various methods to improve and grow.


Qualifications:
BA/BS degree in related field and 4 years of related experience; master's with 2 years' experience; or an equivalent combination of education and work-related experience.
4 years' experience applying both the Scrum Framework and Kanban Method in growing high performing teams as a fulltime practitioner.
Experience as a Scrum Master and/or Kanban Coach at an organization that is committed to Lean-Agile as its core approach for delivering business value.
Experience working with Lean/Agile teams in the context of cloud infrastructure and DevOps.
Experience working with teams applying test automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery capabilities to achieve delivery speed and operational stability.
Experience using Lean/Agile collaboration tools like Rally, VersionOne, Jira


Desirable:
Experience influencing positive and impactful change in organizations working towards Lean/Agile adoption, learning, and growth.
Experience and core values are our top selection criteria; however, certifications help represent one's desire to build knowledge. Some certifications to be considered include Lean Kanban University's TKP, Scrum.org's PSM, Scrum Alliance's CSM/A-CSM, CSP-SM, SAFe Agilist (SA), SAFe Scrum Master (SSM)
Willing and able to provide and receive constructive feedback and advice with a growth mindset.
Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills, particularly in a virtual video and remote environments using tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, MURAL, Trello, or other collaboration tools.
Manages time extremely well, can quickly sense when an issue needs to be discussed or triaged.
Ability to dive into the details when applicable, ask probing questions with curiosity, and sense when and how to take action to enable the team's growth.