Hi, everyone! In this article, I'd like to share my list of top 30 books for Scrum Masters.
I've read all of these books and used them in my practice. They actually work! The books cover all eight areas of the Scrum Master competency model developed by the Agile Coaching Institute:
Agile-Lean Practitioner
This is the first and foremost area of a Scrum Master's skills. A Scrum Master is a practitioner living by the Agile and Scrum values (Openness, Commitment, Courage, Respect, Focus) not in word but in deed. A seasoned Scrum Master has years of experience under his belt working with these values. Here's a list of books that will help you dive into this area.
- Practices For Scaling Lean and Agile Development
- Scrum Shortcuts without Cutting Corners
- Scrum Mastery
- Scrum Field Guide
- Scaling Lean and Agile Development
- The Great ScrumMaster
Teaching and Mentoring
A Scrum Master is an expert, and therefore a teacher/mentor when it comes to understanding real (classic) Scrum. If you wake up a good Scrum Master in the middle of the night, he will instantly list the 11 elements of Scrum and tell you how Scrum values are connected to empirical processes. Here's a list of books on this area.
Coaching
A Scrum Master has the skills of a professional coach. He has studied at various coaching federations, knows how to ask insightful, open-ended questions, and firmly holds the coaching stance. These three books will help you develop these skills.
- Coaching Agile Teams
- Co-Active Coaching (must read for any coach)
- Coaching Questions (a practical book with lots of ready made questions)
Facilitating
You cannot overestimate the importance of facilitating for Scrum Masters because a Scrum Master is in charge of ensuring the efficiency of the process and facilitating the Development Team decisions. I recommend that Scrum Masters who are just starting out acquire this skill first. Use these books:
- Agile Retrospectives
- Gamestorming
- The Secrets of Facilitation
- Facilitator’s Guide To Participatory Decision Making
Technical Mastery
Here are books for a Scrum Master who aims for technical mastery and wants to coach teams on engineering practices:
Business Mastery
Coaching and training Product Owners are important tasks for a Scrum Master. This causes many questions: which product techniques do I use for Product Backlog? How can I help optimize the business value? How do we define our product development strategy? The answers can be found here:
- Strategize
- User Story Mapping
- The Lean Product Playbook
- Value Proposition Design
- Business Model Generation
- Impact Mapping
Transformational Mastery
If a Scrum Master wants to transform organizations and their culture and, what's most important, is brave enough for this, he/she becomes an agent of organizational change. You'll find useful tools in these books:
That's it! I hope you'll find this list useful. I would love to see more real Scrum Masters: practitioners, teachers/mentors, coaches, drivers of engineering and business/product practices, and agents of change!
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