Imagine having to force a distributed team to have four meetings every week, because that's what Scrum says. The team will get burnt out and will end up hating Scrum.

As a Scrum Master, you need to understand the Scrum guide well enough to practically implement it in your team to achieve your goals.

Let's explore some real life scenarios in Agile teams across the world, and see some tips that can guide you in navigating such scenarios.

"The CEO of the Product is standing in as the Product Owner, or the Product Owner is also the Scrum Master"

— Not all teams will have dedicated roles, and that's fine. As long as each person understands their role in Scrum and their responsibilities are clearly communicated.

"The client and CEO sometimes take up the Product Owner role"

— This might confuse the developer, especially when it involves reviewing the work done, given feedback and prioritising the backlog. To prevent confusion and conflict of interest, have both parties attend the scrum events.

"The team is distributed across multiple time zones and finds it difficult to have every one join a call four times a week"

— Encourage asynchronous communication (eg slack) for meetings that does not have to be a call, eg daily standup. If possible, merge the sprint planning, review and retrospective into one call. First 30 minutes to plan the next sprint, and the next 30 minutes to review and have retrospective for the previous sprint. So the team only gets to meet once a week.

"Daily standup seems to be a status update meeting"

— The developers can try talking about their plan for the day, while focusing on the sprint goal.