Position Summary
The Scrum Master supports agile project execution, coaches team members, and promotes continuous process improvement within Magpie. The Scrum Master facilitates sprint cross-functional initiatives while promoting accountability and transparency. The position tracks and analyzes workflow and team performance metrics and drives efficient workplans to increase product delivery that align with project objectives.
The Scrum Master combines strong facilitation and leadership skills with practical business acumen. The individual must understand how the organization creates value, how team deliverables support business goals, and how customer needs, risk, quality, compliance, and operational constraints affect priorities and decisions. Success requires the ability to work effectively with varied personalities, communication styles, disciplines, and levels of authority. The Scrum Master must be comfortable facilitating difficult conversations, constructively challenging assumptions, addressing counterproductive behaviors, and helping teams resolve disagreements without assuming managerial authority.
Primary Duties & Responsibilities
Scrum Facilitation
- Facilitate Scrum/Agile ceremonies (daily stand-ups, sprint planning, spikes, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, retrospectives) and ensure ceremonies are purposeful and efficient.
- Coach and mentor product owners, teammates, and stakeholders on agile or Scrum principles
- Partner with the Product Owner to support backlog readiness, prioritization, and acceptance criteria with business goals.
- Protect the team from unplanned work, unclear priorities, avoidable interruptions, and commitments made without appropriate team input.
- Track and report key agile metrics (velocity, burn-down/up charts, cycle time, throughput) and analyze team performance trends to identify opportunities for improving delivery and predictability.
- Identify and remove obstacles or engage the appropriate owner when resolution is outside the team’s authority.
- Identify process gaps, impediments, and bottlenecks; coordinate with team members, product owners, and stakeholders to remove blockers and implement workflow refinements.
- Continuously gather feedback, capture lessons learned from retrospectives, and drive process improvements.
- Monitor team capacity, help plan releases, and assist in coordinating demos, stakeholder reviews, user acceptance testing, and deployment activities.
Communication and Leadership
- Deliver difficult or unfavorable information without avoiding, minimizing, or unnecessarily escalating the issue.
- Adjust communication methods to suit different audiences, working styles, technical backgrounds, and levels of seniority.
- Recognize when coaching or facilitation is sufficient and when escalation is necessary.
- Foster an environment in which team members can raise risks, mistakes, concerns, questions, and dissenting views without fear of reprisal.
- Ability to manage multiple priorities, deadlines, dependencies, and stakeholder expectations.
- Provide accurate, concise, and candid project reporting to sponsors, stakeholders, and governance bodies.
- Facilitate candid discussions regarding missed commitments, unclear ownership, recurring impediments, and process breakdowns.
Business Acumen
- Develop a working understanding of the organization’s mission, strategy, products, services, customers, operating model, and competitive environment.
- Help team connect sprint goals and backlog items to defined product outcomes and business objectives.
- Understand key business performance measures and help the team evaluate whether completed work produces the intended outcome.
- Consider downstream impacts on operations, customer support, training, reporting, security, compliance, and other affected functions.
- Use business knowledge to improve facilitation and decision support while respecting the Product Owner’s authority over product priorities.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree with 4 yrs relevant exp
Preferred Qualifications:
- Prior experience supporting CMS, HHS, DoD or other federal/state health programs.
- Experience supporting product development, process improvement, organizational change, or compliance-related initiatives.
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), or other agile certification preferred.
- Demonstrated experience using agile tools such as Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, or comparable platforms.