Big List Of Scrum Master Interview Questions - How Many Can You Answer?

This is a list that has grown and evolved over the years with contributions from multiple folks with whom I have had the pleasure of working with.

The guidance, expectations, and questions below helped ensure we were all on the same page when interviewing candidates. This is also a good preparation tool if you are looking to interview for a Scrum Master position.

I know many companies insist on 1:1 interviews, however, I am a huge fan of panel interviews for Scrum Masters and Program/Project managers. Both roles require us to be able to read a room and respond accordingly. If the opportunity presented itself, we would hold 2 separate panels. - one with the Scrum Masters, and another with some key folks from the team they would potentially support. One would be surprised just how different perspective candidates would behave in each situation.

Guidance

Overall: Questions listed below can be reworded to fit interview process. These are baseline questions and not intended to be a restricted set of questions.?The interviewer is encouraged to expand upon the existing questions and to add their own focus on situational questions (even when asking behavioral questions).??"Tell me a time when" helps to identify their actual experience vs knowledge. Additionally, experience has shown that those unable/unwilling to answer situational questions rarely align with the our core values

Pre screen: The person conducting the pre screen should, at a minimum, ask all the questions listed in this section.

In-person: Prior to the in-person interviews, the interviewers will coordinate to ensure that all areas listed below are covered and to avoid duplicate questions.

Kaizen: If we are not constantly challenging ourselves to improve, we are not agile. This list below should evolve and grow over time as we continue to evolve and grow. We want the hiring process to be a team effort and proposals should be vetted and agreed upon by the team.

Key traits to look for in candidates: Answers to behavioral questions provide insight?into?how a person behaves. Here are some characteristics of people that have succeeded:?

• Specific?- Vagueness in the answer is a bad sign
• Self-aware?- Did they find out that they had a role in any of the difficulties encountered?
• Solutions focused?- Were they able to figure out a way to meet the demands of the situation?
• Collaborative?- Do the answers demonstrate a high capability to work and collaborate well with others??
• Curious?- Did they explore different alternatives, talk to others for input, try to learn more about the problem
• Creative??- When faced with hard constraints, did they take a novel approach to succeed?
• Persistent?- Did they work through blocking issues or did they give up??
• Adaptable?- If they're curious, creative, and persistent, they're probably adaptable. How did they modify their efforts to handle a difficult challenge?
• Positive?- Is their answer positively or negatively biased. In other words, do they make a good situation glum or a bad situation bearable?
• Precise -?Did they answer your one-line question with a rambling 7-minute answer or were their answer precise and complete???
• Autonomous -?How have they shown independence and good decision making? How did they ramp up on a new skill or problem domain (like a codebase)?
• Agile - Seek continuous improvement, to satisfy the customer, have shorter timescales for frequent delivery of work, etc.
• Values & Ownership - Having a proactive ability to own their effort without being told what to do. How do they show that they own their work?
• Vision - Have they been able to embrace a solid vision of what needs to be done to ensure all the pieces come together?
• Leadership - As a servant leader (collaborative and not dictatorial), leading?team(s) to execute as per the vision

Red flags to look for

• Reliance on execs for decisions making
• Unwillingness to escalate
• Too willing to escalate
• Unable/unwilling to discuss failures and lessons learned

Pre-screen

Question: Tell me your career summary in about 2 minutes with years of experience as a Scrum Master / Agile Coach

Answer:?Should get a concise 2-3 minute career summary including years of experience as a TPM and years of experience with Scrum

• Looking for clear communication
• Great candidates may ask questions to get feedback like "would you like to know more?" "is that summary enough?"

Question: "Which scrum ceremony do you believe is most important and why?"

Answer:?

• All meetings are equally important. ?What we are looking for here is their understanding of the ceremonies. ?Significant hesitation, not remembering the titles, and/or getting the meetings mixed up are negatives.

Question: "What should one consider when communicating updates to stakeholders?"

Answer:?

• Clear and concise
• Do not "bury the lead" - communicate bottom line
• Avoid going too deep (more detail means less comprehension)
• No emotion/blaming/justification?- just the facts

Baseline Scrum Master Questions

1. What is the role of a Development Manager in scrum?
2. What do you consider the most important ceremony and why?
3. On a day with no ceremonies, what do you do?
4. Should a Dev manager attend retro?
5. Are you familiar with story mapping?? Have you led a story mapping meeting??
6. What are the elements of a good story? or? How do you know you have a story that is ready for Sprint Planning??
7. What is your experience with Scrum? ?/ How long have you worked in Scrum?
8. What are the Scrum ceremonies?
9. Give me a 2-3 minute overview of Scrum.
10. What are the elements of a good story?
11. Do managers attend your retrospective?
12. What do you do when a manager intervenes in a Scrum process?
13. Pick a scrum ceremony and tell me the agenda.
14. What is the daily stand up?
15. How would you help the team to act as a team, and not just a bunch of individuals?
16. How would you help the team to raise the bar, so as to help them to continuously improve?
17. How do you encourage self-management?
18. How do you provide servant leadership?
19. Describe a time when team members didn’t get along. How did you handle this?
20. How can you predict the completion of software in Scrum??
21. How would you encourage team learning (fostering collaborative practices, pair programming, continuous integration, collective code ownership, short design sessions, specifications workshops, etc.)?
22. What are the most important aspects of Scrum?? (best answers include one or more of the following: self-organizing teams, servant leadership, consistent velocity and delivery)
23. What would you do if you heard there was a newly created group for acceptance testing/integration testing?

The Role of the Scrum Master

1. The Agile Manifesto says “People over processes”. Isn’t the Scrum Master – a role to enforce “the process” – therefore a contradiction?
2. What are good indicators that “Agile” is working in your organization, that your work is successful?
3. Are there typical metrics that you would track? And if so, which metrics would you track and for what purpose?
4. Your team’s performance is constantly not meeting commitments and its velocity is very volatile. What are possible reasons for that? And how would you address those issues?
5. Shall the Scrum team become involved in the product discovery process as well, and if so, how?
6. The Product owner role is a bottleneck by design. How can you support the Product owner so that she can be the value maximizer?
7. How do you ensure that the Scrum team has access to the stakeholders?
8. How do you spread an agile mindset in the company across different departments and what is your strategy to coach these non-IT stakeholders?
9. How do you introduce Scrum to senior executives?
10. You already performed Scrum training to stakeholders. After an initial phase of trying to apply the concepts, when first obstacles / hurdles are encountered, you see that these colleagues build serious resistance in continuing with Scrum adoption. What are your strategy/experience to handle such situations?

Product Backlog Refinement and Task Estimation

1. Who should be writing user stories?
2. What does a good user story look like? What is its structure?
3. What should a “Definition of Ready” comprise of?
4. Why aren’t user stories usually simply estimated in man-hours?
5. The Product owner of your Scrum team tends to add ideas of all kind to the backlog to continue working on them at a later stage. Over time, this has lead to over 200 tickets in various stages. What is your take on that?

Sprint Planning

1. How do you facilitate the user story picking progress in a way that the most valuable stories are chosen without overruling the team’s prerogative to define the team’s commitment?
2. How much capacity would consider to be adequate for refactoring, fixing important bugs, exploring new technologies or ideas?
3. How do you deal with a Product owner that assigns user stories or tasks to individual team members?
4. How do you deal with cherry picking tasks by team members?
5. A user story is lacking the final designs, but the design department promises deliver on day #2 of the upcoming sprint. The product owner of your Scrum team is fine with that and pushed to have the user story in the sprint backlog. What is your take?
6. A member of the Scrum team does not want to participate in the sprint planning meetings but considers them a waste of time. How do you deal with that attitude?

Standups

1. Would you recommend 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 with an impediment?
3. How do you handle team members that “lead” standups, turning them into a reporting session for them?
4. How do you handle team members that consider standups to be a waste of time and therefore are either late, uncooperative or do not attend at all?
5. How do you approach standups with distributed teams?
6. Can you draw a draft of an offline Kanban board for a Scrum team right now?

Retrospectives

1. Who should participate in the retrospective?
2. Do you check the team health in a retrospective? If so, how would you do it?
3. What retrospective formats have you been using in the past?
4. How can you prevent boredom at retrospectives?
5. A team is always picking reasonable action items, but is later not delivering on them. How do you handle this habit?
6. How do you recommend to follow up on actions items?

Additional Questions:

• If we bring you on and you start on an existing Scrum Team tell us the steps you will take when getting started?
• Tell me about a time you made a mistake.? (answer should show person took responsibility and owned fixing the problem)?
• How do you get teams to participate with their cameras on?