Javier Castro

Posted on Sep 3

The Agile Roles Dying Aren't the Ones You Think — The Ones Who Wore the Title Like a Costume Are

#industryeconomicscareer

The Scrum Master job market hasn't collapsed because companies outgrew agility. It's collapsed because too many Scrum Masters never actually practiced it.

Somewhere in a UK bank's open-plan office in late 2023, a thousand people discovered their job title no longer existed. The bank — one of Britain's largest, unnamed publicly but confirmed in practitioner forums — eliminated its entire Scrum Master and Agile Coach function in a single restructuring sweep. Around 1,000 positions, gone. That same year, Capital One axed 1,100 Scrum Masters, and Royal London made 90% of theirs redundant. These weren't quiet budget trims. They were institutional verdicts.

The Agile practitioner community processed this with the expected mix of grief, LinkedIn solidarity posts, and philosophical hand-wringing. But there's a harder question buried underneath the shock: what if the organizations cutting these roles aren't wrong?

That's the uncomfortable place this piece wants to sit for a while. Because the dominant narrative — that short-sighted executives are torching agility in pursuit of quarterly efficiency — misses something important about why so many of these roles became expendable in the first place. The market is sorting. And it is not being subtle about who it's sorting out.

The Accountability Gap That Nobody Wanted to Name

Capital One's own statement, released when it suspended its Agile Delivery team, read: "The agile role in our tech organisation was critical to our earlier transformation phases but as our organisation matured, the natural next step is to integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices."

That sentence deserves more attention than it got. "Earlier transformation phases." The implicit message is that the role had a job to do, and — at least in Capital One's read — that job is done. Whether you believe that framing or find it convenient cover for a headcount reduction, it reveals an institutional expectation that many Scrum Masters never negotiated with explicitly: you are here temporarily, and your success should eventually make you unnecessary.

Once envisioned as transformative change agents, Scrum Masters have increasingly become mere meeting facilitators in many organizations, according to two decades of agile transformation experience documented by practitioners on Scrum.org. This is the rot at the center of the current job market crisis. A Scrum Master who spent their career scheduling retrospectives and updating JIRA boards has not been doing the job. They've been doing the performance of the job. And performances get cut during budget season.

What accelerated this was what practitioners have called the "90-Day Agile Coach Phenomenon" — individuals with minimal experience, perhaps just a few Sprints under their belt, rebranding themselves as Agile Coaches. The title isn't the problem. The absence of anything behind it is. The certification factories that printed CSMs and PSMs throughout the 2017–2022 boom years created a supply problem: more people flooded the job market after layoffs, but few had the advanced skills to differentiate themselves from anyone else who'd passed the same multiple-choice exam on a slow afternoon.

The result: a job category stratified between practitioners who actually move organizations and those who learned just enough Scrum vocabulary to pass an interview.

What the Job Market Data Actually Shows

The broader tech hiring contraction provides context here. After a rough 2023, the layoff wave continued through 2024 — more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to Layoffs.fyi. Software developer job listings tell a similarly grim story: since February 2020, Indeed's aggregated data shows vacancies as low as during the depths of the pandemic.

So this is not purely an agile story. The entire tech hiring market contracted sharply from its pandemic-era peak. But within that contraction, coordination and process roles — the ones furthest from shipping code or generating revenue — took disproportionate hits. When engineering teams shrink, the ratio of facilitators to engineers suddenly looks obscene to a CFO running a spreadsheet.

What's interesting is the structural logic some companies have started applying. The more honest interpretation of what's happening is often this: companies wake up to the reality that they are doing Agile rather than being Agile, and see the Agile roles as part of the problem. That's a significant distinction. If your Scrum Master is the one enforcing the ceremonies while the engineering culture itself is waterfall with a backlog on top, eliminating the Scrum Master doesn't destroy agility. It removes the paper-thin veneer of it.

The Scrum Guide notes that the Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team's effectiveness. If the Scrum Master is not the manager, there is an inherent conflict — and if managers aren't responsible for their team's effectiveness, it raises legitimate questions about their value. This tension was always there. Tight budgets just made it visible.

The Counterargument, Stated Fairly

Here is where the "Scrum Masters deserved it" narrative genuinely overreaches: the organizations eliminating these roles are not, by any measure, demonstrating that they've outgrown the need for what the roles were supposed to do.

The signs that follow agile departures are familiar: a sudden obsession with metrics, velocities compared across teams and individuals, story points and deadlines treated as goals, stand-ups that grow longer by the day. What replaces the Scrum Master is not enlightened self-organized teams operating with calm empiricism. It's usually a project manager from 2008 who never stopped thinking in Gantt charts, now with extra authority and a mandate to "streamline delivery."

Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters face impediments related to value delivery, release frequency, team morale, trust, and psychological safety — and these impediments often go unresolved because of a lack of management and leadership support. That's not a failure of the role. That's a failure of the organizational conditions in which the role is placed. Many executives view the Scrum Master through a traditional management lens, expecting direct control, visible productivity improvements, and immediate ROI. Expecting a servant leader to produce ROI you can graph in Q2 is a category error. The fact that organizations keep making it doesn't make the role wrong; it makes the org chart wrong.

Scrum Masters need clearly defined escalation paths and executive sponsorship that provides air cover when challenging the status quo. Without that, organizations create a revolving door of Scrum Masters who burn out trying to drive change from positions of limited influence. When those people eventually get laid off, executives conclude that agility doesn't work — rather than that they never gave it the structural conditions to function.

The Product Manager Rewrite: A Different Kind of Pressure

While the Scrum Master market contracts, the Product Manager market is contracting in a subtler way: through redefinition. The title is surviving, but the job description is being rewritten in ways that are quietly eliminating a generation of practitioners who entered the field through soft-skill adjacency.

Companies now seek candidates with product management experience and a strong quantitative and technical skill set. Stanford Online coaches instruct PM candidates to highlight their data-driven approach in every competency — showing how they use data to inform design decisions, choose which features to build, settle disagreements, and assess success. That's not a soft bar. The PM who built their career on stakeholder relationship management and roadmap storytelling, without the analytical substrate to back it up, is finding their CV returned unread.

The Product Manager's role is moving from feature ownership to strategic leadership — which sounds like a promotion but is actually a harder mandate. Strategic leadership requires demonstrable commercial outcomes. A product manager is now responsible for setting goals, defining success metrics, keeping various teams and departments motivated, and is accountable for the prevailing outcome and performance of a product. Outcome. Performance. Not process ownership.

The PM who spent five years writing user stories and running sprint reviews without owning a P&L metric is now competing against engineers-turned-PMs who can read a cohort analysis in their sleep.

What Survives, and Why

None of this means that Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, or classically-trained PMs are finished as a professional class. It means the market is bifurcating. Practitioners who can demonstrate measurable organizational impact — shipping velocity, defect rates, team retention, cycle time reduction — are still employed. Some are thriving.

A pitfall of an Agile Coach or Scrum Master is that they get too attached to their role — no longer addressing impediments because they fear losing their assignment or impacting their career. The ones who escaped the current purge tend to be exactly the ones who never prioritized their own job security over the quality of their coaching. That's not ironic. It tracks perfectly with how value creation works.

For years, some agile practitioners have been coaching companies and leaders to see the Scrum Master and similar roles as accountabilities that relevant leaders take on — not necessarily formal dedicated roles. That framing — agility as organizational property, not departmental headcount — is the one that survives budget cycles. The Scrum Master who treated their role as a permanent professional identity rather than a temporary accountability is now browsing LinkedIn with the rest.

The shakeout in agile roles is uncomfortable, sometimes unfair, and occasionally indiscriminate — large-scale cuts always catch capable practitioners in their blast radius. But the job market is asking a straightforward question that the agile community has been ducking for a decade: can you show me what changed because you were here? That question has always been the correct one. The only thing that's changed is that tolerating a non-answer has gotten expensive.

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