Since I’m approaching 30, you’d think I’d have figured this out by now. I used to think I did: work hard, keep learning, and ultimately advance along a technical path on merit. Of course, that discounted the realities of office politics, Putt’s Law, and a business mindset often still focused on advancement only through the management chain. With them in mind, though, I’ve continued to pursue the goal of a more formal technical leadership position while carving out smaller leadership and project management roles along the way.
Technical leadership, to me, means keeping engaged and abreast of technology in order to guide the overall direction of a project and a small team to a successful delivery. This seemed to match the more hierarchical team lead interpretation of scrum master on my previous project, where the power and decision-making was largely concentrated in the “inner circle” that the scrum of scrums became. I take no credit for the term, but it’s totally apt - individual developers and even technical area leaders like myself were largely out of the loop.
Seeing the scrum master role as a facilitator and more of a project management role in this week’s training challenges that assumption. When I served as a scrum master before, I certainly found it to be more of that than technical direction. And it that respect is was still satisfying work - having the real pulse of the team and being engaged with many people to keep it beating. Growing as a technical leader also still appeals to me, though I’ve yet to see an organization or a pure enough scrum implementation where that kind of responsibility and authority naturally grows out of an individual role.
In summary, I suppose I’ve figured out one or two places I want to go, and am still working on finding and walking the right path to get there.
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