I’m talking full on scrum master, marketing person creator of decks and helping with strategies, product roadmaps and launches, etc.?
What were some of the challenges you faced, or did you feel it was too much or manageable? How did you organize things and time?
Yes, it’s miserable and impossible to do any of the roles very well. Your only hope is to have a development team who can take a lot of the scrum master responsibilities. Additionally, put a lot of effort into communicating goals and priorities to the team so they can be empowered to make decisions without you. Don’t become the bottleneck.
@MarcoSilva, What exactly are all of these roles could you please help me break this down? Perhaps I’m missing terminologies.
Product Manager and Product Owner mean something different in almost every business. I use PM to mean the strategy side of product. PM works in market research, pricing, identifying customer needs, developing the strategic roadmap, and coordinating team members to execute. PO works closely with PM to bring their product vision to reality through delivery. This entails transforming ideas into backlog items, and then creating release and development plans with the dev teams. Scrum Master works as a Scrum/ Agile coach to help the team be high-performing and ensure that Scrum and Agile principles are followed.
I guess the Dev team is pretty well functioning I hope I can believe that.
If that’s THE case I’m left to see metrics of scrum and Of course user stories etc.
I see the PM as you defined as well. Could you break down how pricing works?
Pricing is how much you should sell your product for in order to maximize revenue. Like a anything else in product strategy, it’s complex and depends on your market. Chances are you’re not responsible for it if you’re asking how it works.
Lol. I actually Am which is why if you have any resources, you can recommend that would be great!
It really depends on your business model and who your customers are. Here’s a book i would recommend
From the way you describe it, Product Owner sounds like Program Manager or Project Manager. Is that accurate?
Crap I think my resume has both on there but I did them at seperate times they’re thinking all of this is achievable. I was asked only to invest 20% of my time into the SM role but how really do I do that.
How do I avoid becoming the bottleneck?
My best advice would be focus on the board/work items/and product strategy and let the team self-organize on the ceremonies.
When you say self organise do you mean I still attend all their meet-ups?
I want to leave them to self-organized how does that look like day to day?
Also, would I still do capacity planning etc.?
It’s generally important for a PO to attend stand ups and capacity/sprint planning. The other ceremonies are completely up to you. I specifically don’t attend retro and rely on a lead engineer to share outcomes with the engineering manager and myself.
Deciding what to attend without a scrum master will be dependent on the team’s ability to organize themselves and move work forward. If you notice they aren’t self-organizing themselves, which is most evident by team confusion, conflict, and lots of technical blocks or questions. Then I would work with the engineering manager if you had one to be attending more ceremonies to help you out.
Ah man. I think the VP said his engineer needs to do engineering work and stop being their SM and that’s why it’s gonna come to me.
This was not in the original job description. Can most teams do capacity planning on their own?
What kinds of questions should I ask at capacity planning?
Agreed with @MarcoSilva. Miserable, impossible, and unsustainable, especially if a large team (or group of teams) on large projects. This might work in a smaller company, but the role of scrum master may not be as significant in this case.
I work in a large company where I wear many hats: Atlassian admin for 500+ users (questions, support, access, project setup, workflows, permissions, integrations, Confluence spaces, etc…), scrum master for my own project, scrum coach for the teams that I work with and others (“hey - our department wants to try JIRA and do this Agile thing. Can you help?”), core business analyst responsibilities, a quasi-product owner for my own project (roadmaps, releases), plus some oversight for other projects. I was spread way too thin and wearing down quickly. Stuff started slipping and I was truly a bottleneck.
Organizing time became this: If I can’t answer it in 30-60 seconds, ignore it. If the email is a wall of text or contains attachments, ignore it. The truly important stuff was shouted loudly and bubbled to the top while everything else somehow magically figured itself out. It’s amazing what people can just figure out on their own. Despite my role being refocused, I am keeping this method around 
But, proceed at your own risk. You might tick some people off and get a negative reputation if you’re not careful and kind.
If scrum master is not the hat you want to wear, lean on your dev team(s) to take charge. Engage the developer on the team who everyone looks to for answers (not necessarily the lead developer but the one who is truly a leader). In my opinion, there comes a point at which you’ve empowered developers to understand agile and to self-manage the scrum process. Try it for a few sprints, inspect the results, and pivot if necessary.
Been there, did not enjoy that.
Really? What part of it?
@NatashaMartin, All of it. Everything is on you (more than a usual PM role), it’s just so stressful, you are going to have conflicts on you day to day, in meetings your opinion as scrum master is biased because you are a PO/PM, you cannot dedicate into a fully understanding of the priority, strategy, user because you have to deal with the daily struggle of your development team.
Crap they misunderstood then. I’ve played various roles but at different times of my career. They tied all of them together!
@NatashaMartin, Yes, that’s the thing. You can have those different roles in different times in a career and that is very good, we need to understand everything (t shape skill) but we are not supposed to do it all. I learned a lot working as scrum master, but it is not supposed to be like that forever. In the end we need to be there for the team, our goal is to deliver value to the company and the user, if i can do something to help i will but in the medium to long term it can be harmful.