Between 2024 and 2025, somewhere between the old org chart and the new one, the role of the Scrum Master disappeared. That neutral party whose entire job was to "sit around and trust people" and have no stake in the outcome. The role almost worked like a referee, and we used to point to it when someone asked whether our Agile organization felt "fair".
The role of the Scrum Master used to be one of the pillars of psychological safety in the workplace. Not as a training topic, but as a structural role. Safety existed because someone in the room had no incentive to make disagreements go away quietly. Sometimes they escalated disagreements to a point where they were almost shot down as the messenger by leadership. It wasn't an easy role to fill. There were plenty of pricey but mostly useless certifications and trainings, conferences and books. The one thing that set great Scrum Masters apart from mediocre ones was practical experience - specifically, experience with and around high-performing technical teams, and a solid practical foundation in how to craft working software that actually makes money. Sadly, that's not what most Scrum Masters were interested in. A majority opted for the psychological side of things and focused on "the inner child," the emotions, needs, and patterns of individual people. For some Scrum Masters who didn't feel like putting in the actual work needed to drive concrete outcomes and organizational change, this felt particularly attractive: they filled their days focusing on feelings, self-reflection, and personal narratives in "case work" - their words, not mine.
In the final phase, leadership hardly noticed the role until it was gone - unless there was dissent, of course. Removing the role simplified our org chart, made us leaner. We did get more efficient. It got a lot quieter, for everyone. But quiet is not the same thing as efficient, and companies keep mistaking one for the other right up until their best people stop bothering to argue. People don't just lose their motivation out of nowhere. Quite often, they lose their trust in the company being a "safe space" for their concerns first.
Now, without Scrum Masters as a dedicated role, when a mandate lands from above and a team pushes back, there is no longer anyone in the conversation whose job is to just listen without an agenda. What used to be a disagreement that got resolved in a meeting can now become a grievance that only gets resolved by a dreadful resignation. So did we remove the one mechanism that let dissent surface before it became an exit?
I can see that some people miss this dedicated neutral role - I sometimes miss it myself. Removing it has certainly affected the atmosphere in some teams, and not in a particularly positive way, especially where there were great Scrum Masters. But I still firmly believe the role of the Scrum Master deserves its place in history. To me, it's a costly, multi-year failed experiment.
Today, in 2026, the qualities that made someone a great Scrum Master are still in high demand and will live on forever. It will always help to have someone on the team who can quickly spot a disagreement and nudge people toward resolving it with skip-level action, not just politics. But that's clearly not a separate job anymore. Today, these qualities are table stakes. It's what we should look for in every new hire.
We've removed the referee and still call it a fair game. Because the game was never about the referee. It was always about the skills needed to guide high-performing teams through uncertainty.