Non-Technical Managers – Adding Value to Self-Motivated Teams

In a lot of teams, including mine, the product owner is also a manager for some or all of the team members, so it's hardly uncharted territory. It does pose some difficulties, and for some teams is wholly unworkable, but this is what helped for us:

• The manager and the scrum master must have an open relationship. It won't work if the scrum master is afraid to address issues with the manager.
• The manager must have enough self awareness to realize when his actions are causing problems, and have enough self control to step back, at the very least when the scrum master brings it to his attention.
• The team must be confident enough to stand up to the manager when it is in the best interest of the process.
• The best thing may be for the manager to not always be there. When we noticed people doing the daily status update to the manager, he stopped coming to the scrums for a while. Some of our team members are still uncomfortable with increasing an estimate with him present, so he often steps out during more sensitive parts of our estimation meetings.
• Some meetings are explicit scrum meetings, like your daily standup, iteration planning, and retrospective, but you generally also have design meetings and reviews that are part of making good software. The latter are a lot more important to have experienced technical guidance in than the former.

Essentially, you have a conflict of interest. A manager's job is to meet deadlines. A scrum master's job is to ensure estimates are as accurate as possible and to work at a sustainable pace. A manager tends to want more work pulled into a sprint, and a scrum master tends to want an amount that can be realistically finished, regardless of external deadlines. Although a good manager can balance that conflict, it's much easier when the job is split between two people. Managers usually are much better suited for the product owner role.

There's nothing wrong with acting as scrum master if no one on your team is familiar with it, but your team will see benefits if you hand off that role after a few months. It's important for that role to be seen as a peer. Even non-management scrum masters often have to rotate out after a while because the team starts to treat them too much like a manager.