Aliu Adewale Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Aliu Adewale: The Over-Communicator vs. The Over-Ambitious—Two Patterns Every Scrum Master Should Recognize

The Great Product Owner: The Over-Communicator Who Negotiated Every Scope Change

“This is a guy who over-communicates everything.” – Aliu Adewale

The best Product Owner Aliu ever worked with did something simple that almost no PO does. Before each refinement, he’d pull up the Jira board, record himself walking through every user story, explaining acceptance criteria, talking through the end goal one ticket at a time—and post the video to the team a day or two ahead. This was before Loom existed.

The result: refinement felt less like discovery and more like “walking it back”—the team arrived already prepared, with real questions, ready to engage. He still attended every refinement and never missed a comment in Jira. But the second skill Aliu names matters even more: negotiation.

This PO never let scope creep into a sprint mid-stride without consulting the team first. “If we add these two requests from leadership, what’s the impact? Do we need to take something out?” And if the team said no, he didn’t force it. He went back to leadership and named the consequence: “If we add this, here’s what happens. Are you okay with that?” Over-communication and negotiation—two skills that protect the team and the product at the same time.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time your PO asked the team’s permission before adding work mid-sprint?

The Bad Product Owner: The Over-Ambitious PO Who Never Said No

“Every yes to something unimportant is a no to what matters.” – Aliu Adewale

The Product Owner Aliu names as the anti-pattern is the over-ambitious PO—the one who never says no. Never to stakeholders, never to the business, never to a new feature request. He never considered the size of the team or the capacity of the team.

He was blind to it. Underneath the behavior, Aliu sees a pattern: POs who want to keep their job by saying yes, stakeholders who keep asking because they think they have to, and a team on probation that doesn’t feel safe pushing back. The damage compounds—more features delivered, less value per feature, and eventually the team itself starts to break.

Aliu’s framing is: “More features don’t equal more value. Sometimes more is just less.” The job of the Scrum Master here is to coach the PO on when to say no, when to say yes, and how to recognize that on the phone in front of you right now, 90% of the features in that app you’re staring at—you never use them. Built. Shipped. Ignored.

Self-reflection Question: Is your PO measuring success by features shipped, or by features used?

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About Aliu Adewale

Aliu is an Agile Delivery Lead with over 10 years of experience empowering teams to unlock their potential and deliver meaningful value. As an author, Aliu simplifies Agile principles through real-life experiences, providing practical insights for professionals to apply Agile methodologies effectively in work and everyday life.

You can link with Aliu Adewale on LinkedIn.

You can also find Aliu and his book on agileinplainsight.com.

Aliu Adewale: Success Is Living the Five Scrum Values—And Asking the Team If You Are

“Trust is the foundation of empowerment. When you trust your team, they will deliver beyond your expectation.” – Aliu Adewale

For Aliu, success as a Scrum Master is concrete: the team is living the five Scrum values—commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage—and the organization is getting real value from their work. Commitment shows up in how the team holds itself to a Sprint goal.

Focus shows up in how they protect that goal from noise. Openness reduces conflict because nothing festers in the dark. Respect, Aliu reframes powerfully: respect for someone’s background comes before respect for their skill set—because in a team where people come from different countries, religions, and skill sets, that’s the foundation everything else sits on.

And courage shows up when a team can tell a Product Owner or a stakeholder that no, this can’t be done in this Sprint, and we need to talk about it. But the values alone aren’t success—the test is whether the team is delivering value frequently to the organization.

The way Aliu keeps himself honest is uncomfortable but simple: he sends a survey to his team and asks them to tell him how he’s doing on communication, on risk mitigation, on empowering them to reach stakeholders directly. He starts the assessment cycle the moment he joins—asking the organization what success looks like in this role in the next three months—and he refuses to “get carried away” and stop asking.

Self-reflection Question: Have you ever sent your team a survey asking them to rate you—and acted on what they said?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start, Stop, Continue

Aliu’s go-to retrospective is the classic Start, Stop, Continue. Three questions—What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? What should we continue doing?—and the team has the structure they need to pinpoint their own shortcomings and decide what to do about them.

The reason it works so well, Aliu argues, is the psychological safety the simplicity creates. There’s no jargon, no clever framework, no facilitator gimmick to hide behind. Experienced and self-organizing teams especially thrive with it because they can name what’s not working without you having to call it out for them.

As a Scrum Master, when your team starts pointing at their own gaps without your prompt, that’s the moment you should applaud yourself—you coached them into the space where they can do it.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Aliu Adewale

You can link with Aliu Adewale on LinkedIn.

You can also find Aliu and his book on agileinplainsight.com.

Aliu Adewale: When Everything Is a “Must-Have,” Nothing Is—Prioritization for Real-World Teams

“Every yes to something unimportant is a no to what matters.” – Aliu Adewale

Aliu’s current challenge isn’t from his day job—it’s from a volunteer project for his local Parent-Teacher Association. The group wants to build a centralized app for school announcements, PTA updates, volunteer coordination, event reminders.

The first meeting produced 250 ideas, all of them framed as must-haves, all of them needed before school resumes. The window: three months. Vasco names two traps that most Scrum Masters fall into. First, MoSCoW and similar frameworks aren’t prioritization—they’re categorization.

The moment everything ends up in the “must” bucket, you’re still stuck. Second, prioritizing a feature list assumes features are independent. They almost never are: a login blocks a dozen things downstream; front-end depends on back-end; dependencies decide the order more than desirability does. Aliu’s experiment with the PTA group is a focusing constraint: stop asking “what do we need this year?” and start asking “what do we need in the first three months when school resumes?”

The 50-item must-have list collapsed to five or six features. Vasco pushes it further with his own favorite question: “What’s preventing us from releasing tomorrow?” That’s the question that exposes what really matters—and it almost never returns a list of features.

Self-reflection Question: If your team had to release tomorrow, which of your “must-haves” would you actually need?

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Aliu Adewale

You can link with Aliu Adewale on LinkedIn.

You can also find Aliu and his book on agileinplainsight.com.

Aliu Adewale: The Counterintuitive Fix—How Collapsing the Jira Board Sparked Collaboration

“Collaboration is the foundation of a successful Scrum team.” – Aliu Adewale

Aliu walked into a team where the daily standup was theater. Developers delivered their tickets and forgot about them. QA picked up “their” column. Front-end, back-end, senior architect, junior developer—everyone was a champion of their own silo.

Nobody engaged during refinement. Nobody called anything out. The board had close to ten columns, one per specialty, and it was working exactly as designed: as a handoff system. Aliu’s diagnosis is sharp—the foundation of the team’s problem wasn’t the people; it was the tool. The Jira board was visualizing silos and the team was living up to it.

The fix was counterintuitive: he collapsed the board from nine columns to three—To Do, In Progress, Done. Once “In Progress” was the only place where work lived, nobody could hide. A QA needing to know when a ticket would be ready had to talk to the developer.

A stakeholder asking for status meant everyone on the ticket had to communicate. The team had no choice but to collaborate. As Vasco frames it in the episode: by creating the smaller problem of “hiding status,” Aliu solved the bigger problem of “no collaboration.” Sometimes you have to make things a little worse so they can get much better.

In this segment, we refer to the Agile value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, and to the recognition that the tools we choose shape the behaviors we get.

Self-reflection Question: Is your Jira board designed to enable collaboration, or to enable handoffs?

Featured Book of the Week: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

For Aliu, the book that most inspired him as a Scrum Master is Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson—a book he discovered through a recommendation on this very podcast. The provocative title pulled him in; the content gave him something he could use every day.

As a Scrum Master, you work with people from different backgrounds, different communication styles, different ways of seeing the world. The book maps four personality patterns and, as Aliu puts it, “it might not be a hundred over a hundred, but at least ninety over a hundred about personality and human relation.”

For someone already working on his emotional intelligence, it became a tool for understanding why a message that landed clearly with one team member completely missed another—and what to do about it.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Aliu Adewale

You can link with Aliu Adewale on LinkedIn.

You can also find Aliu and his book on agileinplainsight.com.

Aliu Adewale: The New Scrum Master Trap—Being In Everyone’s Business to Look Busy

“Sometimes the best architecture and design comes from a self-organizing team.” – Aliu Adewale

When Aliu first became a Scrum Master, he wanted to be everywhere. New to the role, new to the organization, with a new team relying on him to deliver, he scheduled extra check-ins, sat in on everything, and made sure his manager could see him working.

The result wasn’t visibility—it was suffocation. The team felt he was in their business, and the deliveries he was trying to protect got worse, not better. Aliu’s wake-up call came from his coach, who told him a sentence he still carries: “Stepping back gives your team the space to take ownership and unlock their true potential.” The hardest thing a new Scrum Master can do is let things roll on their own for a Sprint or two and adjust through the retrospective. But once Aliu did it, the team started self-organizing, owning their day-to-day, and delivering beyond his expectations.

The lesson he names is Agile principle number 5: build projects around motivated individuals, give them the support they need, and trust them to get the job done. The deeper insight from Vasco in this episode: when we want to be in our team’s business, it’s usually because we don’t trust ourselves to know enough—so we try to know everything.

In this episode, we refer to Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet, which Vasco recommends for any Scrum Master learning to step back, and to the Agile Manifesto.

You can also find here the episodes with Turn the Ship Around! Author, David Marquet.

Self-reflection Question: What are you doing this week to “be visible” that the team would actually be better off without?

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Aliu Adewale

You can link with Aliu Adewale on LinkedIn.

You can also find Aliu and his book on agileinplainsight.com.