Davide la Locomotive

True story: I hated Scrum.
I thought it was broken, pointless, bureaucracy wrapped in buzzwords.

Then someone made me a Scrum Master.

I reluctantly decided to learn how it was supposed to work.

And somehow… it worked.

This is the story of how a reluctant Scrum Master accidentally built happy, productive teams—and why I want to write about it.

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A while ago, I was sitting in a conference room.
Our company had just merged with another.
First meeting with new faces.

I sat down next to a guy. We got chatting.

Pretty soon, he started talking about Scrum.

He hated it.

He said it was useless. A waste of time. Broken. Just bureaucracy in a shiny wrapper.

Then he turned to me and asked,
‘What do you think of Scrum?’

I paused.

I told him:
‘I’ve experienced Scrum like that. And yeah—it was awful.
But I don’t think Scrum was the problem.’

I told him I was a Scrum Master.
And that over the years, I’d learned how Scrum should work—and tried applying it that way.

And when it’s applied well?
It works.

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Scrum isn’t intrinsically good or bad.
It’s just a framework.

It’s like a hammer.

What if you saw someone stirring their coffee with a hammer, or trying to paint a wall with a hammer…
and then complaining the hammer’s useless?

It’s not the hammer that’s the issue.

I’m rubbish with a hammer. I keep hitting my thumb.
But if I wanted to get better, I could learn.
With experience, I could use it to build something amazing.

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When I first started on a Scrum team, I didn’t really understand what Scrum was—or what the purpose of all the different meetings were.
There was never any Scrum training.
Which strikes me as odd.

Everyone’s doing Scrum. But nobody teaches you how to do Scrum.
Want to learn Python? You take a course.
Want to learn Scrum?
…you just sit in a meeting and hope for the best.

Scrum seemed pretty dysfunctional.
We’d have meetings and not know why.
Work tickets would be described by literally one sentence.

Retrospectives were the worst.
Developers literally booked holiday leave just to avoid them.
Imagine giving up your own time off to escape an hour of ‘what went well / what didn’t.’
That’s how bad it was.

We’d all sit in a meeting room and complain.
The Scrum Master would say, “Yeah, it’s rubbish, isn’t it.”
Then we’d all go back to our desks.

It was frustrating—because all the developers could see things weren’t working.
We wanted to change things.
We wanted to make the development process better.
But it seemed like it wasn’t possible.

There was a lot of “it-is-what-it-is-ing.”

The Scrum Masters didn’t seem to know what Scrum was either.
Every team did it differently.
Some had unending sprints.
Others skipped retrospectives altogether.

Honestly? After a few years of Scrum…
I hated Scrum.
I thought it didn’t work.
I thought it made everything worse.

And then one day…
I got dragged into a meeting room.

They asked me to be Scrum Master.
I wondered what terrible crime I had committed to deserve this.
I was trying to come up with excuses to say no.

But then I wondered: What the heck is Scrum anyway?
Were we even doing it properly?

I could see how frustrated the developers were.
And how frustrated I was.

I wanted to do something.
I wanted to try and change things.

So I said yes.
But I said I wanted to do it properly.
I wanted to learn Scrum and try to do it as it was intended—whatever way that was.

If Scrum really was broken…
I wanted to break it on its own terms.

If it still didn’t work… at least I’d know I’d given it a fair shot.

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I did some training on Scrum and finally figured out what it was—and what it wasn’t.
We hadn’t been doing it properly.
We’d just been making it up as we went along.

Looking back, I’m amazed it worked at all.

I think the most surprising thing I learned was this:
Scrum Master isn’t a management role.
It’s actually described as a coaching role—representing the interests of the developers.
Working with them. Guiding them.
Ah, I wish someone had done that!

Armed with the actual way of doing it, I started to change things.
It was hard going, but I kept chipping away.

I wanted the developers to have more of a say in how we worked.
So I did.
I listened to them in retrospectives.
The things we could change—we changed.
As long as everyone agreed.

The developers liked that they could change things.
That they were listened to.
That we made things better together.

Later on, retros became my favorite part.
Once the developers realized they could change things…
they couldn’t stop suggesting stuff.

We started doing proper planning and reviewing of work.
Sorry—no more tickets with one sentence and a shrug emoji.

We actually had conversations.
We wrote acceptance criteria.
We made sure everyone knew what ‘done’ meant.

The developers liked it—because they knew what was expected.
Our team started doing really good work.
Customers were happy with it—which made a nice change from before.

The developers were happier.
And slowly… it started to bleed into their lives outside work.

I didn’t realize how much impact it could have.
It surprised me.
I hadn’t expected it to have such a positive effect.

But when it did…
I started wondering how much more I could do.

That’s when things got… interesting.

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I became a Scrum Master because I wanted to change things.
Not just the process—but the environment.
I wanted to help build a place where people felt supported, trusted, safe to make mistakes… and free to do great work.

I’ve done that in three different companies now.
Not because I had power—
but because I chose to act.
To ask questions.
To listen.
To make space.
To lead by example.

I don’t have a glossy certificate hanging on my wall.
What I have is years of getting my hands dirty.
Making mistakes.
Learning what really helps teams thrive.

I’m writing these stories for anyone who’s been burned by bad Scrum.
For anyone who still wants to believe work can be better.

I’m not here to sell you a framework.
I’m here to share what I saw, what I changed, and why it mattered.

Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it didn’t.
But every time—it mattered.

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I never did learn to use a hammer.
But I did learn how to do Scrum.
And I used it to build teams of developers who were happy and productive.

It works.

Now I’m going to write about it:

Eggsplosions, jellyfish, and Dickens-inspired retrospectives.
Don’t worry—we’ll get there eventually.