In January 2023, Capital One eliminated 1,100 roles in what it called its "agile job family." In the bank's own words, and I'm going to quote them directly:
"The agile role in our tech organization was critical to our earlier transformation phases, but as our organization matured, the natural step is to integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices."
Read that again. Critical. Then absorbed.
This is not a failure mode. To me, it's a role evolution story that was decided without the people in that role having a seat at the table. And if you're a Scrum Master or an Agile coach right now, this seems to be the conversation no one is having with you.
So let's have it.
The Conversation Leaders Are Having Without You
I'm Lance Dacy of Big Agile. I'm a certified Scrum trainer with the Scrum Alliance. I teach Scrum Masters, and I coach the leaders who hire them. And in the past few years, I'm seeing more and more of those leaders quietly decide they don't need these roles anymore.
I'll be honest — I don't entirely agree with how Capital One coached their move. We do want teams to mature past needing the Scrum Master or Agile coach as much. We want them to be fully functional and productive. That's the goal. But the fact remains that there is infinite organizational work to do, and this is a real moment in our field. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
I was on a call last month with the director of engineering at a very large retail company. Great person. Smart, well-intentioned. She told me something a lot of leaders are facing right now: she was about to eliminate three Scrum Master positions, mainly because she was struggling to articulate what those people did that the engineering managers couldn't pick up. She was getting pressure from the VP and the CFO to justify that headcount. They needed to be able to say, "What do these people do that helps deliver product?" And they couldn't articulate it.
That's the problem right there.
It's not that the Scrum Masters aren't valuable. It's that a lot of the work that filled their days has become visible to leaders in a way that it wasn't five years ago. What decision-makers see is someone running a daily standup, someone moving cards on a Jira board, someone scheduling retrospectives, someone sending out reminders about sprint planning. And the hard truth is that if that's the job, then yes — AI can do most of that. Engineering managers can do that. The team can do it. Anybody can absorb a lot of these.
The economic conditions over the last three years mean that companies are finally willing to make that call a little bit more boldly.
What's Actually Dying (And What's Actually Thriving)
What's dying is not the Scrum Master. It's the Scrum Master as ceremony facilitator and impediment logger. That job was always vulnerable. It just took a downturn for leaders to act, and frankly, we've gotten better and better at our craft, which has made the basic mechanics more transferable.
I think about professional sports teams as an analogy. The team that wins the Super Bowl isn't magically the best team in the NFL forever. They might be, but it doesn't mean they don't need a coach. In fact, you might need a coach even more, because complacency sets in. So there's a catch-22 baked into our role: a great Scrum Master makes the team less dependent on them. That's the goal. But it can also be the thing that gets you cut.
What's thriving is something the Scrum community officially repositioned five years ago — and I think most of us missed it. That's where I want to start.
The Four Anchors Telling Us Where the Role Is Going
Anchor 1: The 2020 Scrum Guide Quietly Repositioned the Role
Most of you know the 2020 Scrum Guide describes the Scrum Master's accountability, but you may not have noticed the specific language change.
In the earlier version, the guide said the Scrum Master is a servant leader for the Scrum team. We've used that word a lot for a long time. In 2020, that same sentence became — and I'm reading word for word: "Scrum Masters are true leaders who serve the Scrum team and the larger organization."
Servant leader to true leader. And critically, the serving now extends to the larger organization, not just the team.
That's a subtle change people miss. Dave West, the CEO of Scrum.org, did a great job explaining the change publicly. He said the phrase "servant leader" was removed not because Scrum Masters aren't servant leaders, but because they are leaders who first serve. Leaders as servants — however you want to look at it.
Why does that matter? Because the community saw something five years ago that's just now starting to echo out. When organizations read "servant leader," they too often hear "team assistant." And a team assistant is fungible. A team assistant is rotatable. A team assistant is the kind of thing leaders are now saying out loud they're going to replace with AI.
Scrum.org said it directly in a blog post last year: the 2020 update was a deliberate and intentional attempt to reposition the role away from commoditization. Most of us in the community didn't catch it, didn't teach it, didn't live it. And now the market is forcing the conversation.
Anchor 2: The Scrum Alliance Already Calls It Coaching
The Scrum Alliance — which I'm a part of — describes the Scrum Master today as a coach, a guide, a true leader. In fact, in the courses I teach, I cover four interaction types: facilitator, mentor, teacher, and coach. Not a team manager. Not a ceremony runner. A coach whose job is to improve team effectiveness.
Team effectiveness is a strategic outcome, not a set of meetings or checklists. That's the hard part.
Anchor 3: The Agile Alliance Reminds Us This Pressure Isn't New
The Agile Alliance — now part of PMI — has long noted in their glossary that the Scrum Master role has been known by different names: iteration manager, agile coach, team coach. So the title pressure we're seeing right now is not new. It's just the latest chapter in a long ambiguity about what this role actually produces.
Anchor 4: Joiner & Josephs on Why So Few Practitioners Operate at the Level the Role Requires
This is the anchor I lean on most when I'm coaching. Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs wrote a book called Leadership Agility (Jossey-Bass, 2007), which we covered in a video a few weeks back. Their research identifies five developmental levels of leaders: expert, achiever, catalyst, co-creator, and synergist. The first two they call "heroic." You solve problems, you accomplish outcomes, you're the hero of the story.
What's interesting is their research of about 384 managers found that only about 10% operate at the catalyst level or above. Catalyst is when you stop being the hero and start creating the conditions for others to succeed. You surface assumptions, you challenge frames, you coach systems, not just individuals.
That is the level a Scrum Master has to operate at to be indispensable.
If we're being honest, most practitioners — myself included in the early years — were operating at the expert or achiever level. We ran good ceremonies. We knew the Scrum Guide cold. We passed an exam. We solved problems. But we weren't changing how the organization thought and managed work.
Putting the Four Anchors Together
The 2020 Scrum Guide describes a true leader who serves the team and the larger organization. The Scrum Alliance calls that role a coach and a guide, not a ceremony runner. The Agile Alliance reminds us the title has always been under pressure. And Joiner and Josephs tell us that the developmental capacity to operate that way is rare — about one in 10.
That's where the pressure is coming from. And to me, this has been more of a positioning failure on the part of our profession, and it is absolutely fixable.
There's data out there. It's pretty obscure, and people aren't deliberate about finding it. But there is a consulting firm called Humanizing Work that put out a candid piece on this, and their observation was very blunt: every person in the recent Certified Scrum Master class they taught came from a company where the titles of Scrum Master and Agile Coach had been eliminated altogether.
That's a signal.
I don't have clean industry-wide numbers yet, and I'd be careful of anyone who says they do. But when respected trainers, the Scrum Alliance community, and Scrum.org are all talking about the same shift, you should start taking it seriously.
The Scrum Master Impact Test: Three Questions to Answer by Next Friday
I've been using a simple diagnostic with coaching clients, and I'm going to name it now because it's probably time. I call it the Scrum Master Impact Test. It has three questions, and you answer them honestly for the last quarter — not your career. Just the last 90 days.
Question 1: Did your team do something measurably better this quarter because of you?
Not "we did Scrum correctly" — that's not the goal. Did your team's lead time improve? Did the quality of their sprint goals improve? Did the way they handle conflict improve? Did they start shipping more outcomes and fewer outputs?
If yes, and you can name that specific change and the coaching move that produced it, then great. But if the answer is vague, then you're probably still in expert territory, where your value is locked inside the ceremony mechanics. And that's where the role becomes fungible. Cuttable.
Question 2: Did your organization change something this quarter because of you?
This one is bigger. Did a policy change because you surfaced the evidence? Did a handoff get smoother because you coached two teams through the seam? Did a leader adjust an incentive because you made the system dynamics visible to them?
A Scrum Master who can't answer this question is essentially a team facilitator. That's part of the job, but it's also an honest read of the ceiling when the role stays team-bound. Remember, the Scrum Guide explicitly says the Scrum Master serves the larger organization, product owners too — not just the team.
Question 3: Did a leader in your organization think differently this quarter because of a conversation with you?
This is the hardest one. It's also the one that makes the role uncuttable.
The Scrum Masters who are surviving in this market are the ones whose director or VP or senior manager say something like: "I have a different view of what our delivery problems are because of what this person showed me." That is catalyst-level work. That is a seat at the table you don't ask for — you build it.
It's also why the Scrum Alliance has a test question that talks about access to decision-makers and stakeholders. That's a Scrum Master building out a process for everyone, not just for their team.
What to Do This Week
If you looked at those three questions and your honest answer is, "I really can't answer any of them for the last quarter" — take a breath. This is not a career-ending moment. It's a starting point. It tells you exactly where to invest for the next 90 days.
The job market is hard out there. I see people on LinkedIn struggling to find a Scrum Master role. Let's try to retain what we have.
So here's what I think you can do this week. Maybe Monday morning, open a blank document. Write one sentence for each of the three questions. Be specific. Use names. Use numbers. Use outcomes.
If the sentence starts with "I facilitated…" — rewrite it. Facilitation is the input, not the impact. If the sentence starts with "The team achieved…" — that's closer, but push yourself to the finish: "…because I coached X to do Y." If a leader's behavior changed, name that leader and name the behavior.
Those three sentences are your impact statement. You can use them in your next performance review. You can use them on your LinkedIn summary if you need to. You can use them the next time a director asks, "What does the Scrum Master actually do around here?"
The problem is these outcomes are long-winded. They don't happen overnight. It's almost like planting a seed and watching the plant grow for seven years. That's a hard life to articulate, and it's one of the reasons our value is so frequently misread.
If you can't write those three sentences honestly today, then you have your map. Every coaching conversation you have for the next 90 days should push one of those three sentences from empty to specific. Don't try to fill in all three at once. Pick the one closest to where you already have leverage and start there. If you're looking for a job, this exercise will help you build a real resume too.
The Title Isn't Guaranteed. The Function Is.
I'm not going to pretend the Scrum Master title is guaranteed. The Agile coach title isn't guaranteed either. Some titles won't come back, and the ones that do will probably be defined differently than they were even five years ago.
But here's the takeaway. The Scrum Guide already told us what this role is supposed to be: a true leader who serves the team, the larger organization, and the product owner. The certification is not the identity. The impact is the identity. If you can name your impact in three sentences, you can carry that into any role, under any title, under any economic cycle, related to any kind of work.
Nobody can cut a function they can't replace.
That's the opportunity. And I'd rather be in your shoes having this conversation now than one or two years from now, when the rebound happens and the practitioners who used this window well are the ones leading the next generation of whatever the profession looks like then.
A true Scrum Master or Agile coach works on the organization, not in it.
If your organization is wrestling with this right now — whether you're a Scrum Master rethinking your position, or a leader trying to figure out what to keep and what to let go — this is exactly what we do at Big Agile. We train and coach product teams and leaders who want real outcomes with less friction. No buzzword soup, just the practical work of building a profession that earns its seat at the table.