The T Word - Technical fluency for modern Scrum professionals

One of the most common pieces of advice Scrum Masters hear is:
"You don’t need to be technical."

While that advice may have made sense previously, in today's landscape it can be at best limiting and at worst actively harmful to modern Scrum and Agile Delivery professionals. Modern engineering teams now operate in complex environments involving cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, data platforms, distributed systems, and increasingly AI-driven tooling.

So what happens when the person responsible for supporting delivery and improving team effectiveness doesn’t understand the technical systems the team is working with?

In this talk, Dave Westgarth explores the growing technical literacy gap facing many Scrum Masters and delivery professionals. Drawing on real-world experience working with engineering teams, he’ll explain why technical understanding is becoming increasingly important for anyone working in delivery roles.

This session will cover:

• Why the idea that Scrum Masters “don’t need to be technical” became so common
• How modern software delivery environments have changed
• The challenges Scrum Masters face when they lack technical context
• What technical literacy actually means (and why it doesn’t mean learning to code)
• Practical areas Scrum Masters can explore to better understand the systems their teams build

Rather than turning Scrum Masters into engineers, this talk argues for something different: systems awareness and technical literacy as a key capability for modern delivery professionals.
Whether you are new to Agile or have years of experience working with Scrum teams, this session will challenge some common assumptions about the role and explore how it may need to evolve in the years ahead.