Protection can lead your team to a comfort zone instead of desired process improvement. Who is better to get your team out from comfort zone? Market or ScrumMaster?
What is “Comfort Zone”? Wikipedia says:
The comfort zone is a behavioural state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviours to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk
So, you definitely don’t want your team to be in that condition.
ScrumMaster
This person is often considered a coach for the team. And the goal is to make sure that team does the best work they possibly can. To do that there are tons of tools that can be grouped like this (at least from my point of view, suggestions for more tools are welcome :)):
- Gamification: e.g. playing scrum with lego
- Power questions during retrospectives
- Visualization techniques + 1000 sticky notes and colourful pens
As you might understand all this requires a lot of determination and patience at least from Scrum Master. You often get natural resistance when you want to introduce something new or challenge a status quo. This process is not necessarily effective because it depends on a lot of factors and mostly on experience of a Scrum Master. And for “experienced” teams it’s very easy to stay in comfort zone and defend their beliefs.
Market
It’s much easier here! Either you satisfy your customer and provide value for him or not. You know what will happen If you stay in comfort zone:
- they will laugh at you, if you are lucky
- client will not get back to you, if you are not lucky and they have this possibility
You might still need to educate your client to work according your process: participate in planning and reviews, give feedback.
Recommendation?
Don’t protect your team from end-users/market, and enjoy watching how your team achieves hyper performance!