How to Boss-Scrum
Ever watched a train wreck in slow motion? That’s basically what happens when your boss decides they’re now a “Scrum Master” after skimming a Medium article during their morning coffee. Let me paint you a picture of what happens when someone with a corner office and an ego to match decides to “transform” your workplace with their unique interpretation of Scrum.
The Daily Stand-up (Or as I like to call it: The Daily Inquisition)
Remember how daily stand-ups are supposed to be quick, 15-minute sessions where team members share updates? Well, Boss-Scrum has other ideas. These meetings now start promptly at 9 AM and end… whenever the boss feels like they’ve extracted enough information to micromanage everyone for the rest of the day.
“Tell me EXACTLY what you did yesterday. No, more detail. MORE. Why did that task take four hours? Johnson over there could do it in two.”
The meeting that should take 15 minutes now consumes your entire morning, with the boss interrupting every team member to explain how they could do their job better. The three questions have evolved into an interrogation that would make criminal investigators take notes.
And heaven forbid you mention an impediment! Rather than removing obstacles, Boss-Scrum sees this as a personal weakness. “Impediments? In MY team? Sounds like someone isn’t being a team player.”
Meanwhile, the sprint board has become a sophisticated public shaming tool. Tasks magically appear mid-sprint because “agile means flexible, right?” And those story points you carefully estimated? They’re now “aggressive targets” that the boss arbitrarily doubled because “we need to push ourselves.”
The Shitrospective
The retrospective has transformed into a bizarre monologue where the boss explains how everyone needs to improve while conveniently forgetting every organizational issue raised in previous sessions. Any critique is met with, “Let’s take that offline” – the professional equivalent of “read at 8:43 PM and never responded.”
The Back-clog refinement
My personal favorite is how product backlog refinement works under Boss-Scrum. The product owner carefully prioritizes the backlog based on customer value, market research, and strategic goals. Then the boss swoops in and rearranges everything based on “a conversation I had with my golf buddy” or “something I saw on LinkedIn.”
The Sprint Fantasy-Planning
Sprint planning has evolved into what I can only describe as fantasy fiction writing. The boss insists the team can complete twice the work they managed last sprint because “I believe in you guys” – a sentiment that would be touching if it wasn’t immediately followed by “and I’ve already promised the client we’d deliver all of this.”
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The beauty of Boss-Scrum is how it takes all the principles of servant leadership and turns them completely upside down. Instead of shielding the team from distractions, the boss forwards every client email to the entire team with helpful notes like “Thoughts?” or the classic “Please fix.”
And documentation? Who needs that when you have the boss’s ever-changing verbal instructions? “I know I said to build it that way yesterday, but I’ve been thinking…” is the sentence that launches a thousand emergency code rewrites.
Let’s not forget how Boss-Scrum handles the concept of “potentially shippable product increments.” Under this revolutionary approach, “potentially shippable” means “whatever we have by the deadline, even if it catches fire when you click the login button.”
What makes this especially entertaining is watching the boss explain to visiting executives how they’ve “implemented Scrum by the book” while the team exchanges knowing glances. The executives leave impressed with the terminology being thrown around, completely unaware that what they’ve witnessed bears as much resemblance to actual Scrum as a tricycle does to a Ferrari.
So there you have it. If you want to Boss-Scrum, just ignore everything that makes Scrum effective. Treat it as a tool for control rather than collaboration. Use the ceremonies as opportunities to assert dominance rather than foster transparency.
Or maybe, just maybe, you could actually read the Scrum Guide, understand that it’s built on trust and respect, and approach it with humility and a genuine desire to help your team succeed.
But where’s the fun in that?
