Day in the Life of a Lead Scrum Master in the UK

create and enhance highly available solutions to process over 700 card transactions per second with sub-second response times. As the payments landscape evolves, we’re evolving the platform to integrate with digital payment services and modernize our architecture without causing any impact on our clients. I drive operational excellence, foster continuous learning and contribute to the scrum master community of practice.

Mentor and mentee
Mentorship has played a critical role in my career. I both mentor new scrum masters and am mentored by one of our solution train engineers. I mentor new scrum masters in other agile release trains to help them settle their new teams. They shadow my day-to-day work to learn up close how I operate. On a broader scale, I’ve taught other teams about agile and agile framework best practices— I helped create standardized content for all scrum masters. Being on both sides of mentorship, both mentoring and being mentored, is so crucial to developing careers.

Tapping senior leadership
I once helped facilitate new innovation days with other scrum masters. When planning the innovation days, we struggled with promoting the event to employees. I got more leadership involved in the event publicity and recorded info sessions about the innovation day to use before and during the event.

Community of women
I helped create a ‘Women in Tech’ community of practice. We meet up once a week to have lunch, ‘rub minds’ on different tech topics, and share how we help our local communities. We’re all passionate about inspiring young girls to get into tech. We’re such a diverse group– I’ve enjoyed even just meeting up to share recipes from our diverse cultural backgrounds. We’ve truly built a community of women in leadership.

Turning weakness into strength
In my experience, it’s rare for an employer to encourage both leveraging your strengths and developing weaknesses. So at Discover, the sky is the limit. My business knowledge on network payment authorizations has grown massively. I’ve used training courses at Discover to drive process improvements, productivity and improve my agile competency. When I work hard, I’m acknowledged and recognized. I truly believe that only I am my own limitation.

Motherhood and leadership
Being a wife and a mother, it’s important to me to have a work-life balance. Discover puts ‘employee wellness’ at our core. This value set allows me to take the time off if I need to attend to my family’s needs.

Taking educational leave
We have an employee recognition tool called Bravo. I love knowing I’ll be recognized with prizes and gift cards just for doing my normal job. We can also take educational leaves. I also took a course to become certified in a specific agile framework. The course itself took a week, and after the course ended I used a few of my ‘annual study leave’ days to take the professional exam. I passed! I’m really proud of this achievement and that Discover trusted me to take on the certification.

Look no further
If you want a place where you can grow your career while feeling valued, respected, appreciated and invested in, then look no further. Discover is a dream come true for me— a really nice place to work and grow at the same time.