Book #1: Think Again by Adam Grant
This is a great read for anyone in any role, but it’s an especially impactful book for people looking to pivot their career into the agile space. Agility is built upon Empiricism, which means gaining knowledge through experience. Teams are continually inspecting and adapting their work and their plans based on actual customer feedback and experience, as opposed to sticking rigidly to a pre-set, predetermined expectation of how the product and customer would interact, like we see in Waterfall methodologies. Think Again is a particularly effective read for developing an empirical mindset, because it takes the reader through a series of thrilling, interesting stories of situations where rethinking everything led to a successful outcome for a team or a person. Along the way, you will learn strategies to question your assumptions, recognize what you don’t know, and thrive in a rapidly changing world. This book nails the mindset and the attitude needed for a strong Scrum Master, and it will enable you to embody the true meaning of agile, outside of the specifics of any particular framework.
Book #2: Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Diana Larsen, Esther Derby, and Ken Schwaber
This book is a great companion to Think Again, because while the latter helps you develop an agile mindset and nail the philosophy behind why it’s important to inspect, adapt, and iterate, Agile Retrospectives will give a new Scrum Master the actual tools to lead fun, effective Sprint Retrospective meetings. For a Scrum Master early in their career, one of the scariest and most stress-inducing parts of the job can be the Sprint Retrospective. While an experienced Scrum Master is busy all day long coaching, observing, advocating, and unblocking, a new Scrum Master often finds the retro to be the main occasion in which they are being demonstrating their skills and impact. As the main scheduled “time to shine” before the SM is comfortable with their team, it’s important to feel confident in your retro facilitation skills. This book will not only give you helpful guidance around getting the most out of your team’s retros and helping them open up, it will also give you concrete examples of tried and true retro formats and tools. It’s a great resource for anyone who’s feeling a little nervous about leading these meetings for the first time, and will be sure to help you hit the ground running starting with your team’s very first sprint.
Book #3: Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins
In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins gives advice to readers moving into an agile coaching role. With agile coaching as a key piece of the Scrum Master position, this book should cover everything you need to know about playing the various parts required to be a strong agile coach. For a job that can one day look like a teacher, the next day a mentor, that afternoon, a problem solver, and simultaneously a conflict navigator, serving your team can be more complicated than most expect. Adkins will help you build a healthy team environment and evolve your practices and leadership style as the team matures. This book will help you prepare for the unexpected, and teach your team to welcome change rather than avoid it.
Book #4: Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller
This is a great book to read before you land your first Scrum Master role, or at any point in your agile career. Ripley and Miller lay out the most common problems they have observed in their experience working with many different scrum teams. This is the book you’ll want to have read for the problem solving piece of being a strong Agile Coach and Scrum Master. It is packed with real-life examples of frequent issues that scrum teams face and is an incredible resource for the behavioral interview questions you are likely to face when applying for jobs. Think of it like a cheat sheet for all of the tricky situations you will probably find yourself in within the first few years of your Scrum Master career. Not only will they guide you in the right direction and empower you to take the best steps possible for your team, they will also explain exactly why they make the recommendations they do, and help you build confidence in your own agility and problem solving skills. This is an absolute must-read for every Scrum Master or Agile Coach, no matter where they find themselves in their agility journey.
Book #5: The Scrum Guide
Ok, this one is a bit of a trick because The Scrum Guide isn’t technically a book. But it’s definitely the most important resource you can read if you are trying to become a Scrum Master. All of scrum is contained within this one 20-page document, and the most crucial thing you can do to start your scrum career is to master its teachings. Every interview question, every team meeting, and every challenge you face as a Scrum Master will lead you back to consult The Scrum Guide. Lead Scrum Masters with decades of experience will read and reread the Scrum Guide constantly, referring back to it monthly, weekly, or even daily. If you only take one thing away from this article, let it be to go read The Scrum Guide. Whether you are brand new to scrum, 5 years in, or more, you’ll never regret rereading it today, and you will likely find something new each time you do. A sentence you’ve read dozens of times will take on a whole new meaning when your team is grappling with a problem or complexity they haven’t faced before. If you are applying for your first Scrum Master job, it is absolutely crucial that you know The Scrum Guide inside and out, and you will most likely be asked questions during interviews in order to assess your understanding and familiarity with it.
Thanks for reading! Did we leave out a book that helped you land your first Scrum Master role? We’d love to hear about it if so.