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“Ownership is one of the most important things, and knowing how to hold this ownership.” – Marcin Klimaszewski
Marcin defines Product Owner success through ownership. The word is in the title, but in many organizations the role is not actually given the authority, clarity, or support needed to make decisions. A successful Product Owner protects the team from conflicting stakeholder pressure, becomes a reliable decision point, and gives the team a clear sense that product decisions will lead somewhere.
Marcin shares a Product Build Day example where a founder entered the day with a clear statement: the prototypes and tests would inform real product direction, not become a fun internal exercise. That clarity changed the team’s energy. People knew the work mattered, the decision would affect future sprints, and the Product Owner would own the result. Vasco connects this to Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink: Product Owners cannot hide behind “someone told me so.” They need to own the goal, the trade-offs, and the decisions that guide the team.
Self-reflection Question: Does your team know which product decisions are real decisions, and who owns them?
Marcin’s favorite retrospective format starts quietly. Everyone writes feedback on sticky notes, online or offline, often anonymously. The notes are then revealed, grouped into similar themes, named by the team, and voted on so the group can select the most important topic to address. The strength of this format is that it gives quieter people room to contribute, makes everyone read what others wrote, and reduces the chance that the loudest voice defines the whole conversation.
Vasco adds a useful sanity check: after voting, ask whether anyone sees a better idea on the board that did not get selected. That small pause helps the team guard against groupthink. Marcin’s tip: do not use any retrospective format too many times in a row. Change the format to create fresh thinking.
About Marcin Klimaszewski
Marcin Klimaszewski runs Product Build Days. One day to validate a business idea. Teams build the app themselves with AI tools, use synthetic users to sort out the usability, and design the sharpest test they can run the next day with real users. For founders, PMs, designers and other non-coders. An idea that cannot survive one day is not worth a quarter.
Product Build Day // Pro is Marcin’s one-day, hands-on training in rapid product discovery for Product Owners, Product Managers and designers. It runs in Berlin on Thursday 26 November. You learn how to build a working prototype with AI, fix what trips users up with AI users, design the cheapest test that gives you a go or no-go, and train pitching it in three minutes to the people who decide. No coding needed. Scrum Master Toolbox listeners get €100 off with the code TOOLBOX100, valid until 31 October.
https://productbuildday.com/pro
You can link with Marcin Klimaszewski on LinkedIn.
“If I can ship everything by the weekend, what is worth shipping?” – Marcin Klimaszewski
Marcin’s current challenge is one many Product Owners recognize immediately: convincing stakeholders to invest time and money in discovery. Everyone says they want to understand the customer, but when discovery becomes real work, the pressure returns to plans, backlogs, and delivery.
Marcin points to the Double Diamond design process as a useful way to explain the work. The first diamond explores problems and decides which problem deserves attention. The second diamond explores solutions. Many companies rush into the second diamond and become feature factories. The backlog is already large, stakeholders already have promises, and discovery can feel like more uncertainty instead of progress.
Marcin’s experiment is to shrink discovery into something stakeholders can tolerate and teams can actually run: Product Build Day, a one-day workshop where people build AI-assisted prototypes, pitch options, and design the sharpest user test for the next day. The larger shift is clear: product development is a search problem, not just a delivery problem.
In this episode, we refer to Design Thinking’s Double Diamond and Product Build Day.
Self-reflection Question: How much of your backlog exists because the team is avoiding the uncertainty of discovery?
About Marcin Klimaszewski
Marcin Klimaszewski runs Product Build Days. One day to validate a business idea. Teams build the app themselves with AI tools, use synthetic users to sort out the usability, and design the sharpest test they can run the next day with real users. For founders, PMs, designers and other non-coders. An idea that cannot survive one day is not worth a quarter.
Product Build Day // Pro is Marcin’s one-day, hands-on training in rapid product discovery for Product Owners, Product Managers and designers. It runs in Berlin on Thursday 26 November. You learn how to build a working prototype with AI, fix what trips users up with AI users, design the cheapest test that gives you a go or no-go, and train pitching it in three minutes to the people who decide. No coding needed. Scrum Master Toolbox listeners get €100 off with the code TOOLBOX100, valid until 31 October.
https://productbuildday.com/pro
You can link with Marcin Klimaszewski on LinkedIn.
“The user never wants to log in. That is never the goal of the user.” – Marcin Klimaszewski
Marcin describes a pattern he has seen too often: teams speak about users as if the team already knows what users need. In one EdTech example, the obvious solution looked simple from the development side: students should log in. But in a classroom with twenty or thirty students and only forty-five minutes, login was not a neutral feature.
A few forgotten passwords, a few typos, and the teacher suddenly became an administrator instead of a teacher. The Product Owner needed the team to see the real problem, not just the technically familiar solution. The eventual answer was simpler for the users: the teacher logged in and shared a code with the students. That gave the product enough identification without stealing classroom time. Marcin connects this to the Sam Walton reminder that the customer is the real boss.
For Product Owners and Scrum Masters, the work is not to defend our preferred solution. The work is to keep asking what problem the user is trying to solve.
In this segment, we talk about EdTech and the Sam Walton idea that the customer can fire everyone by spending money somewhere else.
Self-reflection Question: Where is your team solving an internal business problem and calling it a user need?
Marcin recommends The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick because it helps product people and Scrum Masters ask better questions. The trap is familiar: we explain our idea, ask whether people like it, and receive polite opinions instead of useful evidence. Marcin points out that better discovery starts with people’s real experiences, problems, and past behavior.
He also recommends Sprint by Jake Knapp, a practical guide to design sprints and structured product discovery. Sprint helped him see workshops as sequenced decisions toward a larger goal, not ceremonies to follow blindly. The method is useful only when it helps the team learn, align, prototype, test, and decide.
About Marcin Klimaszewski
Marcin Klimaszewski runs Product Build Days. One day to validate a business idea. Teams build the app themselves with AI tools, use synthetic users to sort out the usability, and design the sharpest test they can run the next day with real users. For founders, PMs, designers and other non-coders. An idea that cannot survive one day is not worth a quarter.
Product Build Day // Pro is Marcin’s one-day, hands-on training in rapid product discovery for Product Owners, Product Managers and designers. It runs in Berlin on Thursday 26 November. You learn how to build a working prototype with AI, fix what trips users up with AI users, design the cheapest test that gives you a go or no-go, and train pitching it in three minutes to the people who decide. No coding needed. Scrum Master Toolbox listeners get €100 off with the code TOOLBOX100, valid until 31 October.
https://productbuildday.com/pro
You can link with Marcin Klimaszewski on LinkedIn.
“I am not the user. That is how I learned how important it is to keep your ego small.” – Marcin Klimaszewski
Marcin Klimaszewski started in product as a webmaster, writing HTML and CSS, before discovering UX design through a colleague who became his mentor. That shift changed how he looked at software: not as screens to build, but as problems to understand.
In this episode, Marcin shares an EdTech product story where the team had everything a product person could hope for: access to students and teachers, weekly validation, a strong Product Owner, and a confident team. The problem was that success started to distort the team’s relationship with the rest of the organization. As the team received positive user testing feedback, they began to see themselves as the best team in the company.
From the outside, that confidence looked like arrogance, and critical dependencies with sales, marketing, e-commerce, and payments became harder to manage. The product eventually launched, but never reached the sales targets. For Marcin, the lesson is sharp: user testing is not market testing, and Product Owners need Scrum Masters who help teams stay connected to reality before the market does it for them.
In this episode, we refer to EdTech and Product Build Day.
Self-reflection Question: Where is your team getting positive feedback that may be hiding the real market risk?
About Marcin Klimaszewski
Marcin Klimaszewski runs Product Build Days. One day to validate a business idea. Teams build the app themselves with AI tools, use synthetic users to sort out the usability, and design the sharpest test they can run the next day with real users. For founders, PMs, designers and other non-coders. An idea that cannot survive one day is not worth a quarter.
Product Build Day // Pro is Marcin’s one-day, hands-on training in rapid product discovery for Product Owners, Product Managers and designers. It runs in Berlin on Thursday 26 November. You learn how to build a working prototype with AI, fix what trips users up with AI users, design the cheapest test that gives you a go or no-go, and train pitching it in three minutes to the people who decide. No coding needed. Scrum Master Toolbox listeners get €100 off with the code TOOLBOX100, valid until 31 October.
https://productbuildday.com/pro
You can link with Marcin Klimaszewski on LinkedIn.
