Scrum Master Roles Are Vanishing Because Many Never Did the Real Job
Major companies including Capital One and Royal London made sweeping cuts to Scrum Master and Agile Coach roles in 2023, eliminating over 2,000 positions combined, with a large unnamed UK bank axing around 1,000 such roles in a single restructuring. Capital One stated publicly that agile processes had matured enough to be embedded directly into core engineering practices, framing the cuts as a sign of organisational progress rather than retreat from agility. Critics and practitioners argue the deeper issue is that many Scrum Masters reduced their role to scheduling meetings and managing JIRA boards, performing the job rather than practising it. A certification boom between 2017 and 2022 flooded the market with minimally trained practitioners, making it difficult for genuinely skilled professionals to stand out. The current wave of redundancies is seen less as a rejection of agile methodology and more as a market correction sorting out those who lacked the skills to drive real organisational change.
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