Scrum Master

Must-Have Traits

• Senior-level Scrum Master / Delivery Lead experience — someone capable of operating beyond basic ceremony facilitation.
• Strong leadership presence — comfortable stepping into leadership conversations and influencing stakeholders.
• Excellent stakeholder communication — must be able to communicate effectively with leaders, build relationships, and navigate challenging conversations.
• Relationship-building skills — Mary specifically emphasized the ability to establish relationships across the organization.
• Cross-team/system-level perspective — able to identify impediments and dependencies across multiple teams rather than focusing solely on one Scrum team.
• Strong Agile/Scrum foundation — the role is still fundamentally a Scrum Master position, even though the organization is calling it Delivery Lead.
• Ability to work with Product and Engineering leadership — particularly important because the Managed Accounts organization is rebuilding its teams and establishing Product leadership.
• Ability to operate independently and challenge leadership appropriately — Mary's positive example of the previous successful Scrum Master was someone who could respectfully question leaders and make an impact quickly

Nice-to-Have:

• Retirement / financial services experience — explicitly not required . Mary said leadership/stakeholder skills are more important and that enough business knowledge can be learned to understand what the team is doing.
• Experience working in a Delivery Lead model — helpful given the evolving terminology, but traditional Scrum Master experience can translate.
• Experience working across multiple Agile teams/programs — highly relevant to the new emphasis on the broader system.
• Ability to transition into other Client's projects/teams — not technically a hiring requirement, but could be valuable given Mary's desire to retain strong performers beyond the initial project.