Good Scrum Masters are almost always busy. Yet, plenty of articles wonder what a Scrum Master does all day. In response, here are 10 Things A Good Scrum Master Never Says:

#1 I have nothing to do today because my team isn’t facing any impediments!

#2 The product backlog is in such good shape that we don’t need to look at it anymore this sprint.

#3  I wish we had at least another page of documentation on that requirement. It would help clarify what our stakeholders want.

#4 Our meetings don’t start or end on time, but I can’t change that because it’s part of company culture.

#5 I know everything about scrum, so there’s no need for me to attend scrum-related meetups, classes, or conferences anymore.

#6 If only I had more hard power. Then I could affect real change.

#7 I’m so bored of our daily scrum meetings that I always find myself spacing out! I wish we could just skip them once in a while.

#8 Everyone in my company is on board with this agile thing. There’s no need for me to take them to coffee to get to know them a bit more.

#9 Our retrospectives are so useful that I don’t need to research any new facilitation techniques.

And lastly…drum roll please…

#10 I wish we could go back to the waterfall model. At least we had clarity on what we were trying to build.

Perhaps this list of “quotes” will give the doubters a sense of how complex the Scrum Master role really is, and how few people really have the skills to do it right.

Any other quotes you’d like to add to this list? Feel free to comment below.