“Success is when a team can improve without having me drive every conversation.” – Joseph Osei-Kusi
For Joseph, Scrum Master success is not a clean Jira board or perfectly run events. Success shows up when the team becomes more honest, more autonomous, and more able to inspect and adapt without depending on the Scrum Master for every conversation. He looks for small accountability signals: team members raising risks early, developers challenging unclear priorities, people calling out broken working agreements, and retrospectives leading to real experiments. If the Product Owner and developers only talk when the Scrum Master arranges the conversation, the role has become a dependency.
Joseph also watches how stakeholders are brought into the improvement loop without letting them take control of the team. The point is to create the right conversations and protect the team’s ability to make decisions. For Scrum Masters, the invitation is clear: measure success through team behavior, not through ceremony performance.
Self-reflection Question: If you stepped away for two weeks, which improvement conversations would your team still have without you?
Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Mad/Sad/Glad Plus One Concrete Experiment
Joseph’s favorite retrospective format is Mad/Sad/Glad followed by one concrete experiment. The format helps teams talk about the human experience of the sprint instead of staying at the level of mechanics. What made us mad? What made us sad? What made us glad? But Joseph does not let the team stop at venting. Once the patterns are visible, he asks for one small experiment the team is willing to try in the next sprint. One real experiment has a better chance of changing behavior than ten action items nobody owns. In the next retrospective, the team can inspect whether the experiment helped, whether to continue it, change it, or stop it.
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About Joseph Osei-Kusi
Joseph is an Agile coach and Scrum Master obsessed with the human side of delivery. He has focused on moving teams beyond just “following the process” to delivering value. He champions radical transparency and psychological safety, and believes that when you get the people part right, everything else falls into place.
You can link with Joseph Osei-Kusi on LinkedIn.
