The Scrum Master Who Lasts.
Postures and systemic moves from a senior agile coach.
Knowledge Ladder Academy publishes the book by its founder, Pierre Medina. Reading for Scrum Masters, RTEs, Product Owners, and coaches who want to move past the manual and hold their role over time.
Why this book lives at KLA.
Agile books teach roles, artifacts, sprints. They do not say what coaches actually do when a team is falling apart, when leadership does not understand SAFe, when the backlog burns faster than you can put it out. This book fills that gap.
Pierre Medina, founder of KLA, has spent two and a half decades navigating these waters. RTE rated practitioner, top of the internal ranking at a major industrial account, speaker alongside the practitioners moving the field forward. The book is the written form of what shapes the academy's programs and engagements today.
Reading this book is stepping into KLA's editorial substance. The vocabulary, the postures, the systemic moves it names all feed our teaching paths.
Six chapters, six postures.
- 1.
The postures of a coach who lasts.
How to hold the role without burning out, without being absorbed.
- 2.
Refusing agile dogmatism without getting fired.
Saying no to top-down pressure and brittle conformity.
- 3.
Navigating a technical and human ecosystem at once.
SAFe, trains, increments, and the egos that come with them.
- 4.
Building a credibility no one hands you.
Coach legitimacy without impostor syndrome.
- 5.
Systemic moves that actually work.
Not tricks. Levers grounded in the psychology of organizations.
- 6.
Burnout and its antidotes.
Why good coaches flame out in three years, and how to last twenty-five.
Three passages, in the author's voice.
I have watched agile transformations launched with startup energy crash within six months because no one told leadership that SAFe takes eighteen months minimum and that you lose ground before you gain. I learned to speak that language.
Agile dogmatism kills more transformations than its absence. What matters is not whether you do Scrum by the book. It is whether your teams ship value, learn, and do not burn out. If that means deviating from the recipe, you deviate.
Twenty-five years on the ground taught me one thing. Organizational systems run on anthropology, not on org charts. Understanding that is understanding where the real levers are.
Knowledge Ladder Academy is a Qualiopi-certified training organization specialized in agility at scale, product leadership, and applied AI. Its founder, Pierre Medina, is the author of this book. The academy also draws on a network of senior trainers and practitioners. Recent talks: Agile en Seine, Lausanne, Dakar.
Available in English and French.
Disponible en français : Au-delà du rôle de Scrum Master. Même voix, même terrain, même refus de l'héroïsme.
