At a global company undergoing a massive organizational redesign, the HR team had a dilemma:
“How do we make our performance reviews more meaningful, less bureaucratic, and aligned with how our teams actually work?”
I loved that they had this question, because too often, it's the other way around. They called in a Scrum Master. At first, HR wasn’t sure what to expect, Agile was something “the dev teams did.” But instead of talking about user stories or burndown charts, the Scrum Master introduced retrospectives as a feedback tool, helped them experiment with team-based goal setting, and paired HR business partners with functional leaders to run short-cycle performance experiments in small subset of teams. We formed an improvement community comprised of the right people to make these decisions and present them back to our senior leadership.
Within a quarter, HR had piloted a lightweight feedback process with three departments. Engagement scores went up. Review cycles became faster, clearer, and more human.
HR didn’t “become Agile”, but they started working with agility. And it was the Scrum Master who unlocked the shift through their focus on teaching, mentoring, and coaching.
What.
Agile isn’t just for developers. It’s a way of working that supports adaptability, and adaptability is needed everywhere.
Scrum Masters aren’t just team facilitators or software specialists. They’re translators of agility, capable of guiding functions like HR, Finance, Legal, and Marketing through iterative ways of working. Instead of enforcing Agile practices, they help teams uncover the principles that already align with their work: feedback loops, collaboration, transparency, and continuous learning.
In forward-thinking organizations, Scrum Masters are helping business teams:
Run lightweight experiments on hiring, performance, and budgeting
Replace annual planning with quarterly reviews and rolling forecasts
Introduce visual flow tools for service teams
Facilitate retrospectives and goal-checks for cross-functional workstreams
So What?
Why does this matter? Because agility that’s limited to product teams is agility that’s capped.
If legal teams can’t iterate on policy, if finance can’t flex to adaptive funding, if HR locks down on annual-only reviews, agility becomes theater. But when these functions are invited into Agile principles; not frameworks, but principles, the entire organization becomes more resilient.
Scrum Masters play a key role in making that happen. They bring both the mindset and the facilitation tools needed to translate agility into new contexts.
Now What?
If you’re a leader outside of IT:
Ask your local Scrum Master to help you design a feedback loop or test-and-learn cycle.
Run a retrospective after a big hiring sprint, campaign launch, or policy rollout (community of practice teams, not the development teams).
Experiment with working in smaller batches or updating your backlog (yes, HR and Legal can have backlogs too).
If you’re a Scrum Master:
Learn the language of the business. Translate agility, don’t impose it.
Partner with HR, Finance, Legal, or Ops to build short-cycle feedback into their rhythms.
Treat these partnerships as part of your coaching backlog, not a side project.
Let's Do This!
The future of agility lives across the business, not just in code.
Scrum Masters who can step into new domains and coach through context, not control, are becoming essential to organizational adaptability. They are not scaling frameworks. They’re widening agility by enabling learning, feedback, and flow wherever work is happening.
The business wins when agility moves beyond tech. Scrum Masters are the ones opening that door. Are yours?