The Scrum Master Is a Project Manager with a Little Bit Less Responsibility and One-Third of the Salary

And what is left for the Scrum Master? I imagine the conversation between Sutherland and Schwaber about what to include as Scrum Master responsibilities:

- The Scrum Master will ensure and reinforce Scrum for all team members.

- I agree.

- But... isn’t that too little to do for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week?

- Hmm... you’re right.

- What can we assign to the Scrum Master? It seems all activities are already assigned to the team or to the Product Owner.

- I don’t know, maybe the reports?

- No. We use the burndown by default, and apparently that is enough.

- Organizing meeting invitations?

- No. The events already exist, and there is no need to create more meetings.

- I got it. Let’s say the Scrum Master should remove barriers when the team has problems.

- Considering that a User Story should enter the sprint only when everyone understands it and there are no known blockers, there may not be much to remove.

- Yes, but at least now there is something to say.

- Okay, agreed.

I do not know if this was the actual conversation, but I would not be surprised if it was. In the end, it often feels like the Scrum Master role was created with good intentions, but without enough practical weight to justify what the market later started expecting from it.

But the market is not stupid. It quickly realized that the natural path for many former project managers was to become Scrum Masters. Why? Because a good project manager already removes blockers, negotiates priorities, manages problems, protects the team, and helps people move work forward.

However, a project manager traditionally does much more than remove blockers. A project manager assesses risks, manages stakeholders, controls scope, monitors delivery times, organizes communication, follows costs, supports quality, and sometimes even manages contracts. I have seen many Scrum Masters doing exactly these things — managing project costs, quality, suppliers, risks, executive reports, and stakeholder expectations.

In other words: practically a project manager.

And this has not gone unnoticed by the market. From my point of view, the opportunity the market saw was simple: assign the responsibilities of a project manager to a Scrum Master, pay less, and call it Agile.

The problem is that this creates more issues than it solves. Here are a few reasons:

• A Scrum Master, in many cases, has not studied the broader disciplines of project management, such as stakeholder management, communication management, cost control, risk management, scope management, and governance.
• Generally, the Scrum Master is not formally responsible for project costs. Another manager is. This creates a gap between who sees the team’s day-to-day work and who is accountable for the budget.
• If the manager responsible for costs intervenes, they often do not know what to do because they are not close enough to the team’s daily activities.
• There will be situations that force a “by the book” Scrum Master to perform project management activities. This can become the beginning of a relationship with a dissatisfied employee who is expected to do more than the role originally promised.
• Since the Scrum Master has fewer official responsibilities — at least in theory — they usually receive only a portion of the salary that a project manager would receive. But in practice, the person becomes overloaded with project management work, without the title, authority, or compensation of a project manager.

The result is predictable: deliveries with little control, reports that say almost nothing to executives, weak visibility over costs and risks, and professionals who either do not perform the activities imposed by the market because they do not know how, or do not perform them well because they are dissatisfied with earning half — or even 30% — of what a project manager used to earn.

This is one of the pains that Saint Jude tries to help solve. When companies remove the project manager role but still need visibility over costs, schedule, performance, risks, estimates, task quality, sprint deviations, and delivery predictability, someone still needs to provide that intelligence. Saint Jude can act as a layer of project intelligence over tools like Jira, ClickUp, Azure DevOps, Monday.com, and Asana, helping PMOs and leaders understand what is happening in the project without pretending that a burndown chart is enough to manage cost, risk, scope, and executive expectations.

In the end, the problem is not Scrum itself. The problem is pretending that a framework eliminated the need for management. It did not. It only changed the language. Costs still exist. Risks still exist. Stakeholders still exist. Scope still exists. Communication problems still exist. Delays still exist. And someone still needs to manage all of that.

So yes, in many companies, the Scrum Master became a project manager with less authority, less responsibility on paper, less salary, and more confusion around what they are actually expected to do.

And you, what do you think? Have you experienced situations similar to the ones described above? Like this short article, comment on LinkedIn, or share it on your social networks.

See you soon!

Erik Scaranello