I'm ok with some ceremonies if they are useful. The issue with our current SM is we have the ceremonies, but we don't actually do anything. In the "backlog refinement" meeting, he talks about the stories in the current sprint, which we already talked about on the stand up. In "Sprint Planning" he just talks about a bunch of random stuff... small talk... and then hangs up the phone. The one meeting we really need, a retrospective at the end of sprints to try and right the ship, he "forgets" to schedule. He'll do it once if enough people yell at him, but it takes a lot and ends up being a one time thing. He also doesn't know how to run it, so it becomes an issue. Multiple people have straight up yelled at him in the middle of some of these calls to do the thing we're actually there for instead of whatever random other thing he is trying to do instead. The behavior never sticks. He's simply a bad fit for the role... any role, as far as I can tell.

> What did that one good SM do that the others didn't?

For starters, she was a people person; she'd probably make a good pharmaceutical sales rep. So she was excited to talk to everyone and that helped get other people talking. She tried to mix it up and make it fun. Around various holidays she'd theme the retro for the holiday and get us answering questions in different ways to draw out new answers. Asking the same questions every sprint gets stale. Since she was social, she had a lot of connections to help clear blockers. Our current guy has a lot of connections too, but doesn't use them for anything useful. When something came up on the retro or in a random meeting for her to do, or an idea for a change in how we work, she'd actually implement it.

A lot of it is pretty basic stuff. It's just a question of doing it. The bad SMs I've had simply don't do their job.