What separates a solid Scrum Master from a great one? In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with veteran Scrum Master Brian Campbell to talk about the balance between being empathetic, staying grounded, and knowing when it’s time to move on.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner is joined by longtime Agile Mentors Community member and enterprise-level Scrum Master Brian Campbell to explore the core skills every Scrum Master needs, beyond the textbook answers.

Drawing from 13+ years of experience, Brian Campbell shares how flexibility, empathy, and situational awareness help Scrum Masters navigate real-world team dynamics, conflicting priorities, and tough leadership environments. Together, the Brians discuss how to support product owners without overstepping, when to gently push back with leadership, and how to foster effective teamwork even under pressure. They also dive into what it means to advocate for your team—especially during crunch time—and how to know when it’s time to walk away from an unhealthy engagement.

Whether you’re just starting out or deep into your Scrum career, this episode is packed with practical insight from someone who's been there.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Brian Campbell

Rescue Your Daily Scrum videos

#113: Influence Without Authority with Christopher DiBella

#126: Mastering the Scrum Master Role with Gary K. Evans

The Daily Scrum Meeting - a detailed breakdown

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Brian Campbell is a seasoned Senior Scrum Master with over 13 years of experience helping enterprise teams in healthcare, insurance, and tech deliver real results with agile. He’s known for his calm leadership, strong facilitation skills, and a flexible, coaching-first approach that meets teams where they are.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00 )

Welcome back Agile Mentors. We are here for the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here, Brian Milner, and I also have with me another Brian. I have Mr. Brian Campbell with me. Welcome in, Brian.

Brian Campbell (00:12 )

Hi. Nice to be on the podcast.

Brian Milner (00:13 )

⁓ I was, yeah, we're really happy to have you here. I always kind of joke with, with other Brian's and, and, Brian is one of the other ones I can joke with here about this and say, thank you very much for spelling your name correctly. Brian is, is, someone who's a member of our agile mentors community and he's, he's shared a lot of really great, advice and he's mentored people through there.

Brian Campbell (00:27 )

I do know people too.

Brian Milner (00:39 )

So we wanted to highlight that, but he's an enterprise level scrum master. He's been doing this for a while. He's got over 13 years experience as a scrum master and has had some really insightful comments in our and post in the Agile Mentors discussion forums. We're going to link to one in particular that's really interesting that hopefully everyone here will find interesting in the show notes. But we talked about what we would. kind of dive into here and seeing as Brian has all this experience as a scrum master, we wanted to focus on some scrum master issues. in particular, one particular quality that Brian brought up that he felt was really, really essential, and I agree with him, for a successful scrum master, and that's flexibility. So maybe we start there and just define that for everyone. When you talk about how important it is for a scrum master to be flexible, What does that mean to you, Brian?

Brian Campbell (01:33 )

Well, there's three things. You've got to work with a product owner at their level. So you may have a brand new product owner who doesn't understand how to construct a story with acceptance criteria or a bug with steps to reproduce. Other times you have a product owner who's really, really on their game and very established. And then you're going to be more hands off and just providing a little bit of guardrails according to the way the company works. You're going to be flexible with the daily standup. I've had teams rebel against the idea that standup has to be run cookie cutter scrum. So you may find that they prefer to go person by person. And that's fine. You may find they prefer to go issue by issue. You may find that you do it a whole section at a time. Dev, QA. going down a column on a board just to try and work with the team the way they want to be worked with. But my goal as a Scrum Master is to make it efficient and effective. I'm not trying to keep them sitting on a call for the sake of being a Scrum Master. But get familiar with how each company does things. Don't try to radically improve things. Suggest incremental improvements where merited. So don't come in guns a-blazing trying to change everything in the environment. Come in, observe for a while, make a little course correction here and there. Suggest things if they're above your station that might allow you to allow the teams to work more effectively. So those are three ideas.

Brian Milner (03:02 )

Yeah, that's awesome. I agree with you on those. think those are really important. There's kind of this, starting with the last thing that you brought up there. There's kind of an idea that I've heard people say before. I've always subscribed to this as well. Kind of the evolution versus revolution kind of approach to doing things that you're going to be served better by trying to incrementally in small little doses change things rather than big bang. let's all of a sudden, Monday morning, everyone's going to be doing Scrum. It doesn't really work very well if you try to drastically change things. I know that's one thing with Kanban I've always appreciated is Kanban talks about start with where you are. And I think that's a good approach for us as Scrum Masters as well, is kind of start with where the team is,

Brian Campbell (03:31 )

Yeah. Well, I've also done Kanban implementations and where people are doing scrim and they want to do Kanban and developers think there isn't a lot of, you know, I'm just going to be wild, wild west and do what I want. But Kanban has its own structure and way of doing things that you need to get the team, its own set of ceremonies, et cetera, that you need to get the team familiar with.

Brian Milner (04:06 )

Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned earlier as well, like trying to be flexible as you work with your product owners. I agree there as well. Product owners, you know, come in all shapes and sizes as far and all kind of levels of experience. maybe you'll get lucky and you'll have one that's really experienced and doesn't really need a lot of help. But maybe you'll get one that's brand new, that's never done this before. In which case you have to have a lot of patience and a lot of time to coach and help them get up to speed with what's really going to be valuable. Brian Campbell (04:38 ) Yeah, they need different kinds of support. I think the new scrum master may, new scrum master, new product owner may require, let's read, let's start that one over again. I think they will require different levels of support. The.

Brian Milner (04:48 )

Yeah. ⁓

Brian Campbell (04:51 )

the new product owner needs to have have stronger agile guard rails in place. The biggest problem I have sometimes is there's a product owner that's very set in their waste. I had one product owner who decided that he was going to map out all the work for this quarter and tell a sign by developer and even story point the items. And I had to go to management and say, Hey, this guy's bad. We'll get into that later. You have a time to move on thing. This was one of my times to move on because management was not supportive and changing his viewpoint. ⁓

Brian Milner (05:30 )

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's part of just being agile that you expect the kind of same attitude towards being flexible from the product owner that, hey, you know, I'm going to grow and learn. And maybe that starts with kind of a humility of just saying, I may not be right.

Brian Campbell (05:49 )

Yeah. I like to form a trika between, well, actually four people. I like to get the product owner, the dev