Scrum Master Interview Questions

I like the idea of structuring questions on specific areas of scrum mastery so I’ve set up
questions per section based on the Age of Product examples and contributions from Rahul
and Angie.

Table of Contents
Scrum Master Interview Questions ................................................................................... 1
Role of the Scrum Master ......................................................................................................... 1
Backlog Refinement and estimation ......................................................................................... 2
Sprint Planning ........................................................................................................................ 2
Daily Scrum.............................................................................................................................. 3
Sprint Review .......................................................................................................................... 3
Sprint Retrospectives ............................................................................................................... 4
Contextual Questions ............................................................................................................... 4
Other Frameworks ................................................................................................................... 4

Role of the Scrum Master

We want to gauge what the candidate’s understanding of the Scrum Master is in an
organization. Ideally, they will be able to describe the theoretical description of the role
from the Scrum Guide and contrast it to their own experiences or observations. We will look
for a strong understanding that the role is a leadership but not management role.

1. The Agile Manifesto says “people over processes”. Isn’t the Scrum Master, a role
meant to enforce the process, therefore a contradiction?
2. What would you consider good indicators that agile is working for your organization,
and that your efforts are succeeding?
3. Are there any common metrics that you would track? If so, which metrics would you
track and for what purpose?
4. Your team is constantly failing to meet commitments, and its performance velocity is
volatile. What might the possible reasons be? How would you address this issue?
5. Should the scrum team become involved in the product discovery process, and if so,
how?
6. The product owner role is a bottleneck by design. How can you support the product
owner so that they can maximize value?
7. How do you ensure that the scrum team has access to a project’s stakeholders?
8. How do you spread an agile mindset across different departments and throughout a
company, and what is your strategy when coaching non-IT stakeholders?
9. How would you introduce scrum to senior executives?
 10. You’ve already provided your project’s stakeholders with training in scrum. After the
initial phase of trying to apply the concepts, when the very first obstacles are
encountered, some of these stakeholders begin to resist continued adoption. What
is your strategy for and experience in handling these situations?
11. Two team members of your team had a conflict and now they are not talking to each
other. How would you approach the situation?
12. How would you assess the performance of individuals in your teams?
13. There is a non-performer in your team, and you and team are aware of it. How
would you handle the situation?

Backlog Refinement and estimation

While the Product Owner is responsible for keeping a backlog and plan for future releases,
the Scrum Master has a responsibility to help coach the PO in doing this effectively. The
questions in this section are to gauge the SM’s understanding that cross-functional teams
that work together on this backlog are best set up for success.

1. The product owner for your team normally turns stakeholder requirements
documents into tickets, and asks you to estimate each. What would your response
be to this request? What are the implications of your answer?
2. What kind of information would you require from the product owner to provide your
team with an update on the product and market situation?
3. Who should be writing user stories?
4. What does a good user story look like? What is its structure?
5. What should a “Definition of Ready” consist 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 kinds to the backlog
so to remember to work on them at a later stage. Over time, this has led to over 200
tickets in various stages. What’s your take on this? Can a scrum team work on 200
tickets?
8. Your team sized a user story incorrectly and you know about it. How would you
convince them to change their sizing?

Sprint Planning
A SM should understand that a good Sprint Planning (with good refinement) results in a
good Sprint. We want to gauge the candidate’s understanding of the process, what happens
with requirement, capacity planning and dealing with uncertainty.

1. How can you as a Scrum Master contribute to sprint planning in such a way that the
team is working only on the most valuable user stories?
2. With what metrics would you assess the value of a user story? What metrics would
not be acceptable?
3. How do you facilitate user story selection in a way that the most valuable stories are
chosen without overruling the team’s prerogative to define their own
commitments?
4. How much capacity would you consider 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 team members “cherry picking” tasks?
7. A user story is lacking the final designs, but the design department promises to
deliver on day two of the upcoming sprint. The product owner of your scrum team is
fine with that, and pushed to have the user story put in the sprint backlog. What’s
your take?
8. A member of the scrum team does not want to participate in the sprint planning and
considers the meetings a waste of time. How do you deal with this attitude?
9. What is the difference between Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog?

Daily Scrum
This section is to gauge the candidates understanding of the purpose of the Daily Scrum, as
well as their role in engaging the team in the process.

1. Would you recommend formal 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 overcoming an impediment?
3. How do you handle team members that “lead” standups, turning the event into a
reporting session for themselves?
4. How do you manage team members that consider standups to be a waste of time
and who are therefore either late, uncooperative, or who simply don’t attend?
5. How do you approach standups with distributed teams?
6. Can you draw an example of an offline kanban board for a scrum team right now?
7. The Daily Scrum of your team goes beyond 30 minutes every day. What would you
do?
8. Your most senior team member feels like the Daily Scrum is a waste of time. They
don’t attend and consistently vocalize their feelings on this. What can you, as a SM,
do? What are the implications?

Sprint Review
The Scrum Review is an important event to allow the team to demonstrate working
software and get feedback into their product. It’s important that the SM candidate is aware
of the purpose of this event as well as how to coach the team and PO to get the most
benefit from it.

1. Your PO doesn’t feel a Review is necessary as she has already seen all the work
demonstrated during the sprint. How would you respond to this?
2. During your Review, the stakeholders give feedback into how the team should
change their process and in what order they should complete work. What would be
your response to this?
3. Your team has completed no work during the sprint. Would you still hold a Review
meeting? Why?
4. Your team wants to demonstrate work that was partially completed on one of their
machines, it does not meet the Definition of Done but they really want to show that
 they are progressing. What might the benefits of doing this be? What about the
drawbacks?

Sprint Retrospectives
A SM needs to know the purpose of the retrospective as well as some good facilitation
principles for dealing with a broad range of problems. The ultimate goal here is having a
safe space for the team to identify and work towards getting better – the candidate should
be able to explain how to do this.

1. Who should participate in a retrospective?

2. Do you check the team’s health during a retrospective, or is doing so unnecessary? If
you do, how would you go about it?
3. What retrospective formats have you used in the past?
4. How did you facilitate your last sprint retrospective and what was the outcome?
5. How do you prevent boredom during retrospectives?
6. Your team is picking reasonable action items, but is later not delivering on them.
How do you handle this?
7. How would you recommend following-up on action items?

Contextual Questions
{TODO: create a case study and specific contextual questions for this section. Below is
directly from Angie’s suggestion}

We gave some key information as part of the case study e.g. This an e-commerce team. The
team only does estimates at sprint planning, the product owners commits to the backlog
months in advance with a detailed release plan and dates, there is a pre-prod testing cycle
that is very time intensive and cause delays if bugs are found, etc.

We provide a backlog broken down into massive component epics e.g. Cloud framework =
80 points, UX shell = 75 points, etc.

We ask interview ees a list of questions e.g. How would you split the team? How would you
explain their changing role to an IT executive? Plot out a diagram that you can show to
stakeholders about when you are going to take items into a sprint – take uncertainty and
changing requirements into account… etc.

We gave different “levels” a different amount of prep time. So if people said they were an
Agile Coach, they got no prep time and were expected to answer on the fly. If they were a
Scrum Master with 3 years of experience, we would give them 20 min to prep.

Other Frameworks
It’s important that a SM realizes that Scrum is not so prescriptive to cover all areas of
product development and that a good SM has knowledge of other frameworks and practices
that can benefit their team.