Scrum Master, Next-Gen Software Solutions

Company Overview

Bain & Company is a global consultancy that helps the world’s most ambitious change-makers define the future. Across 65 cities in 40 countries, we work alongside our clients as one team with a shared ambition to achieve extraordinary results, outperform the competition, and redefine industries. We complement our tailored, integrated expertise with a vibrant ecosystem of digital innovators to deliver better, faster, and more enduring outcomes. Our 10-year commitment to invest more than $1 billion in pro bono services brings our talent, expertise, and insight to organizations tackling today’s urgent challenges in education, racial equity, social justice, economic development, and the environment. Since our founding in 1973, we have measured our success by the success of our clients, and we proudly maintain the highest level of client advocacy in the industry.

Position Summary

As a member of our Agile Center of Excellence, the Scrum Master will work directly with Bain’s Next Generation Software Solutions team, supporting the team in adopting Agile & Scrum practices. This role acts as the “servant leader” of a specified agile product team by removing impediments and coaching the team in the agile methodology. They must understand the business at a high level and be able to exercise technical aptitude to understand and resolve technical impediments.  They must be capable of leading a team to self-organization and push back against the Product Owner. This role facilitates the appropriate scrum events and employs various techniques to foster collaboration and protect the team from outside distractions. They will support the Product Owner to ensure that the product backlog has substantial ‘sprint ready’ items that tie to the overall product vision.

Essential Function

Work with two scrum teams - (90%)

• Facilitate the appropriate scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-Ups, Backlog Refinement, Retrospectives, sprint/release planning, and other Scrum-related meetings
• Inspire the agile product team to embrace the full adoption of scrum practices by coaching the team on the framework and instilling an ‘inspect and adapt’ mindset
• Empower the team to self-organize in pursuit of a better, more fulfilling experience and improved productivity 
• Generate a common understanding amongst the team of the product vision and strategy 
• Create an environment for the agile product team to thrive by protecting the team from outside distractions and over commitment
• Champion ongoing process improvement initiatives to implement best practices for Agile Project Management
• Design processes and practices to help the team anticipate and identify impediments while resolving basic team impediments. Recognize when to escalate the impediments and who to involve
• Assist in team development while holding team members accountable for their commitments, removing roadblocks to their work, and mentoring and developing team members
• Ensure that each team member is fully engaged in the project and making a meaningful contribution, and encourage a sustainable pace with high-levels of quality for the team
• Advise and coach the Product Owner on the scrum framework, getting items to ‘ready’, user story best practices, writing good acceptance criteria
• Drive sharing of scrum best practices across Bain agile teams
• Provide management level reporting on project status, risks and mitigation strategies
• Track and communicate team velocity, happiness and sprint/release progress to all affected teams and management

Agile champion (10%)

Qualifications –

Education and Work Experience:

• Bachelor’s or equivalent experience required
• 5-7 years of experience
• Scrum Master experience with proven ability to apply Scrum, Kanban, and other Agile Practices
• Demonstrated knowledge of Agile software development and processes

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Some expertise in agile ways of working or demonstrated motivation to learn
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills
• Self-motivated, proactive, and dependable
• High level of detail orientation
• Proactively identifies conflicts or roadblocks, often able to resolve independently
• Effective conflict resolution skills
• Flexible to shifting priorities
• Aspires to learn from best demonstrated practices and to improve work efficiency and sustainability
• Ability to work independently and with teams
• Demonstrated aptitude to follow technical discussions
• High performance and standards as demonstrated by academic or previous job experience