The Scrum Master is typically sourced from a leadership positions in the organization they are working in. This doesn’t have to be a management position, and in fact that is often a detriment since people sourced this way will often user their command and control power instead of influencing the Team.

Potential sources include:

• Technical lead on the Team
• Senior Team person
• People manager
• Project manager

A word of warning. Being a Scrum Master means that you also need to step away from being whatever it was you were before your were a Scrum Master. This is often hard to do. For example, if you used to be a Technical Lead on a Team, and now are a Scrum Master, then it will often seem like the easy thing to do is to save this technical issue, just like you used to do as a Technical Lead. This is a trap. Scrum Masters need to look at the whole Team as a system, not just the bits they already know well. While it might seem like the right thing to do, what it really means is that (in this case)

• The Team is not learning how to solve these technical problems themselves.
• Perhaps worse, we are ignoring other aspects of the Team where there are in fact issues to address.