The Scrum Master had been supporting her development team for nearly a year. Their velocity was stable, standups were doing their job, and retrospectives often wrapped up early with clearly defined improvements for the next Sprint. From the outside, things looked smooth. But releases were still getting delayed, and leadership couldn’t understand why.
She decided to look beyond the team. She began mapping the complete flow of a recent customer-facing initiative, from marketing concept to design handoff, into development, and out through customer deployment.
What she discovered was startling: six handoffs, three approval gates, and multiple delays where no team “owned” the work. Marketing had its own backlog. Dependencies between departments were hidden in Slack threads and hallway conversations. This turned out to be bigger than just getting our developers' work into Production. It was about a Go-to-market strategy.
The Product Owner was overwhelmed with work; no one was really focused on guiding the team's work into the customer's hands.
The velocity chart showed a high-performing team. The system map revealed a deeply fragmented workflow beyond the team. I love this part of our job, focusing on strengthening our teams, then you often start seeing bottlenecks elsewhere in the organization.
Celebrate!
What.
This is the kind of insight only possible when we coach the system.
Agile frameworks often focus on the team level, and that’s where most Scrum Masters stop. But real agility isn’t about how fast a single team moves. It’s about how smoothly value flows across the organization.
Coaching the system means zooming out to see dependencies, structural misalignments, policy barriers, conflicting incentives, and unspoken norms. It’s what Peter Senge described in The Fifth Discipline: seeing the whole, not just the parts.
Scrum Masters who develop this systems thinking muscle begin asking new kinds of questions:
Where does this work actually start and end?
Who’s affected by delays we don’t see in Jira?
What governance decisions hinder us, and why?
So What?
Why does this matter? Because team-level coaching, while necessary, often leads to local optimization. You can improve a team’s retros and standups, but if they’re constantly blocked by upstream approval gates or downstream deployment delays, the team still struggles, and morale suffers.
System-level coaching creates durable improvement. It addresses root causes, not symptoms. And it shifts the focus from fixing teams to aligning systems, culture, structure, incentives, tools, and flow. It’s also where leadership transformation begins.
Once leaders start seeing how their decisions shape system constraints, they become co-creators in enabling agility, not just sponsors of it.
Now What?
Scrum Masters:
Start mapping flow across teams, not just within them. Use value stream mapping or system diagrams to make the invisible visible.
Identify handoffs, queues, blockers, and feedback delays, and bring those into retros or leadership reviews.
Coach your leaders to see patterns, not people, as the first lever for change.
Leaders:
Invite Scrum Masters to help you examine decision latency, siloed planning, or policy friction.
Stop asking how the team is performing, and start asking how the system enables or constrains them.
Be a catalyst leader!
Let's Do This!
The best Scrum Masters don’t just coach teams, they coach the space between teams. That’s where the real blockers live. That’s where culture is reinforced. And that’s where agility either flows… or fails.
In 2025, team agility is table stakes. System agility is what makes transformation sustainable. And Scrum Masters who can see and coach that system are the ones delivering lasting change. Are yours?