Service to the Business vs Value to the Customer
These are two VERY different things, since no company is run by it's customers. There's still that human layer (Product Management) between customers and the product that make bad decisions sometimes about what is or is not valuable. From a Scrum Master perspective, I have heard what people think the goal/mission of a good scrum master should be, and they are typically fall into two categories: Service vs Value. those are in opposition many times, so which one do you ascribe to?
The goal of a good Scrum Master is to...
...make himself or herself largely redundant at a team level, so more of a focus can then be placed on service to the organization.
or
...to serve the organization in such a way that helps drives greater value to the customer
If you've worked in any organization for more than a minute, you realize that these two are not the same. They should be, but aren't. Sure, does the company have 'good ideas' that make us more money - yes. Do Product people listen to complaints and add items to team backlogs to make the UI, UX or functionality better? Yes, but much of the work we do might serve the organization but doesn't give the customer more value. I liken this to the testing world where a Product Owner can overrule a Tester on a bug needing to be fixed because the PO makes the ultimate call on what does/doesn't go in a release, and that's ok. The Tester ultimately must yield to the Product Owner because the PO has a bigger picture view of risk and are ultimately the ones responsible for it, not the Tester.
So in our world, even if the Scrum Master knows that value to the customer (#2) might be threatened by something the organizations asks for (#1) are they still supposed to adhere to #1?
Thank you all.
So in our world, even if the Scrum Master knows that value to the customer (#2) might be threatened by something the organizations asks for (#1) are they still supposed to adhere to #1?
It's the responsibility of a Product Owner to maximize value. A Scrum Master's service -- to the PO and the wider organization -- can involve challenging their assumptions, including what "value" even means.