If your Scrum Master spends more time chasing timelines than coaching teams… you don’t have an Agile problem – you have a role confusion problem.
Modern IT teams often blur these two roles
Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes due to organizational pressure.
The result? Misaligned expectations, frustration, and confused career paths.
Why the lines are getting blurry:
- Scrum Masters are pulled into delivery accountability, even though the role is meant to be about coaching, facilitation, and team empowerment.
- Organizations still think in traditional project structures, forcing Scrum Masters to act like schedulers and task managers.
- No clear ownership of risks, timelines, and scope, so SMs and Delivery Managers overlap in uncomfortable ways.
- KPIs are mismatched, expecting Scrum Masters to “ensure delivery” instead of enabling high-performing teams.
- Teams receive mixed signals, confused whether to follow agile principles or comply with rigid delivery governance.
When a Scrum Master starts owning delivery, the team loses the very agility they were hired to build.
How to bring back the clarity?
- Define role boundaries clearly : Who owns delivery, who owns coaching, who removes blockers.
- Align KPIs with the actual role: SM metrics should focus on team health, collaboration, and flow, not schedule compliance.
- Educate stakeholders: What Scrum Masters truly do and equally, what they don’t do.
- Create a delivery-focused operating model: Delivery Managers handle the “when” and Scrum Masters handle the “how well.”
Has this confusion ever affected your role or team?
Comment below – let us bring clarity to an industry-wide problem.
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