3 Ways to Grow Your Agile Career

Ricardo Rottmann-Ordoñez has a penchant for threes. Ask him for examples, he'll give you three. Ask him for proof points, he has three. Ask him for reasons why he is so passionate about agile—and you'll see that, for once, three isn't enough for Ricardo.

Today, Ricardo is a scrum master for two marketing teams at a financial institution in Guatemala and a scrum master lead (also called a chapter lead) for the scrum masters of 8-9 other teams. But it wasn't always so. While his journey, like many in the agile community, passed through engineering, the majority of his experience so far has been applying agile ways of working in non-technical environments. His story is proof of what we already know to be true: you can adapt agile processes and tools to work for you. 

He turned his Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®) and Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO®) training into a career. Through his experiences, he has identified ways that a new scrum master can grow not just a good—but a truly great—career.

Three of those ways, actually.

Starting at the beginning

While putting his master's degree in project management to work, Ricardo encountered agile. It started small: a one-hour class. And yet, in his own words, it was "a life-changing experience" to see that work could be fun and free from overly prescriptive steps.

Later, he began working at a bank that had only recently implemented scrum. Completely new to the world of agile, he began where many of us do: Certified ScrumMaster training. He didn't know it yet, but what he learned in that class put him on the path to his present career.

He quickly followed the CSM course up with Certified Scrum Product Owner training—and that brought the pieces together for him. Agile isn't just steps you follow in an instruction booklet; it's a way of approaching work. It's collaborative and values-driven. It brings people together to solve tough problems. And these two introductory courses in scrum really opened his eyes.

"If you have both [certifications] as a scrum master, you can understand how the product owner needs to prioritize the work. I've never been a full-time product owner, but I've been able to help many, many product owners. My first product owner was really resistant to change, and I was able to coach him."

After that, Ricardo "fell in love" with agile. When we asked him why, he gave us—you guessed it—three reasons. First is using powerful questions to help people unearth the answers they already hold in themselves. "I'm a huge fan of aha moments," he says. The next reason is he feels a sense of pride in the "huge toolbox" of agile skills: he's always ready and willing to help teams solve difficult problems. Finally, he gets a kick out of helping a group of people become a team: "They're not really a team until you have that sense of community within them."

Agile beyond tech

Agile began in software, but it has grown beyond that. To this day, agile itself continues to change and adapt. Similarly, scrum has grown beyond software development functions and is used by diverse teams to deliver value, but oftentimes it falls on the scrum master to help non-software teams see the potential of scrum.

Out of the box, scrum didn't work for the marketing teams Ricardo was supporting. "The team wasn't able to plan at first what they were doing." They didn't know how to break something like a marketing campaign into chunks. But Ricardo worked with them, strived to understand their context, and helped them get value out of this new approach.

From those first learnings, Ricardo has come a long way. Now he helps his chapter of 8-9 scrum masters approach their (generally non-technical) work with agility. It isn't about the technical aspects—specific tools or platforms—of marketing. Through one-on-ones, coaching sessions, and scrum event facilitation, he helps them think about how to release increments of value every sprint.

The result can sometimes seem unorthodox. In a marketing context, for example, change happens fast. Your Meta campaign may need immediate attention while you're in the middle of a sprint where launching a Google campaign is the goal. Waiting until the end of the sprint to change could be an expensive mistake. Since you can't wait, you flex. It's not uncommon for a marketing team to change sprint goals—along with the associated deliverables—mid-sprint because that's what's best for the business. When Ricardo shares such experiences with his peers in software development or product development, they come away surprised.

But it works. It works because Ricardo and many others using agile and scrum in non-technical environments are being agile in their application of agility. In this process, he's learned how new scrum masters can really go the extra mile, shooting past "good" to "great." 

Three ways to grow your scrum master career (#3 may surprise you)

In Ricardo's estimation, an effective scrum master should have three key skills:

1. Work on your interpersonal skills. "You have to be able to come to a team member and ask them, 'How can I help you? What are you struggling with? What are your objectives? Are you meeting the expectations from the rest of the team, or not?'" You have to be ready to resolve conflict and have the skills to do so. A good scrum master can take all that and make it fun.
2. Understand the scrum framework and the product you're building. "[You] need to understand how you create a product. What's a product? What does the product look like, and how does it generate income, revenue, or what's the metric that you're trying to move?" This is where more advanced certifications are critical. Ricardo didn't just stop at the basics of scrum; he also took the Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® (A-CSM®) and Certified Scrum Professional® ScrumMaster (CSP®-SM) training. These advanced courses are where he discovered change management, scaled agile frameworks, and visual facilitation—more tools for Ricardo's toolkit.
3. Get comfortable with numbers. Scrum mastering isn't a particularly technical vocation, but there are some numbers that a great scrum master should be savvy about. Things like team throughput, velocity, cycle time, bandwidth and capacity, as well as customer net promoter score (NPS). You don't need to be a data scientist, but you should be able to track these metrics over time and work to continuously improve those that matter most to the business. Why? So you can bottom-line it for leadership. You need metrics at the ready so that when you get those precious and long-awaited 30 minutes with leaders, you know exactly what to hone in on: the business value your team is bringing, or the impediment to that value that you need help removing.

A good scrum master helps teams succeed with scrum. A great scrum master also brings these three key skills together to truly champion their team's value add to the company. If you're strong in all but one of these, then you know what to focus on. It's all about continuous improvement and lifelong learning.

What the future may hold—for Ricardo and for you

There are many benefits that scrum and agility in general bring to the business: reduced time to market, better communication, and better focus on the outcomes. (A final three for you, care of Ricardo.) If you can help businesses with this, you can be a great scrum master.

Ricardo encourages new scrum masters not to get too fixed in their thinking about where they can take agile and what types of teams can leverage scrum. "Don't be afraid to try to be a scrum master for any team. Marketing, HR, finance… those can be scrum teams."

Ricardo is also focused on giving back to his community. Having invested so much time and energy in his agile career, he is looking for ways to help more people. He feels a deep commitment to giving back. Ricardo hopes to become a Certified Scrum Trainer® so that he can bring scrum to people across his region. He notes that there are few scrum certification courses offered in Spanish and he sees a big opportunity to bring scrum training to the world in the Spanish language.

One thing is clear: Ricardo's agile journey is only just beginning.

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Ricardo will be speaking at the Regional Scrum Gathering Lima 2024 in October. The talk: "Thinking outside the box: designing and scaling agile teams."

Additional Resources 

• Advice for New Scrum Masters (members-only content)
• What I Wish I'd Known As a New ScrumMaster
• Scrum, Agile and the Art of Active Listening
• Future-Proof Your Job Skills

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