Christian Thordal Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Christian Thordal: The Jazz Duo Effect and The Absent PO — Two Sides of Agile Product Ownership

The Great Product Owner: Clarity, Accountability, and a Partnership That Fills in the Blanks

“We kind of filled in the blanks for each other, and it felt very natural — it’s grown organically into this partnership where we’re extremely aligned on how we see and do things.” – Christian Thordal

Christian describes his best Product Owner as someone he currently works with — a person who combines deep product clarity with genuine leadership. This PO is fully accountable for the backlog, sets clear expectations toward the teams, and isn’t afraid to push them.

What makes this PO stand out is how they use reporting as a communication tool: alongside the backlog, they proactively communicate to the product leader whether things are within or outside scope, always with a plan ready. Christian and this PO hold weekly follow-ups to discuss the team, the backlog, and the product direction.

Over time, their alignment has become so strong that during facilitation sessions they naturally fill in blanks for each other — one picks up where the other leaves off. Vasco compared it to a jazz duo, where each musician picks up on the other’s leads in real time. This kind of organic partnership in leadership direction reflects positively on the entire team, creating a sense of coherence and momentum that everyone can feel.

Self-reflection Question: How aligned are you with your Product Owner on leadership direction, and what would it take to build the kind of partnership where you naturally fill in the blanks for each other?

The Bad Product Owner: When the PO Disappears and the Scrum Master Becomes the Glue

“You can inspire, you can motivate, but you can’t really do the work for them.” – Christian Thordal

Christian shares an experience from a larger logistics company in Denmark where the Product Owner was a great, likable person — but didn’t understand the role. The backlog was high-level, consisting primarily of Epics with no acceptance criteria. Then the warning signs started: the PO became increasingly hard to get a hold of, started canceling refinement meetings (sometimes on the same day), began working more from home, and became physically more distant from the team.

Christian and the team were left to navigate on their own, breaking down epics into stories and tasks without knowing if they were building the right product. Christian tried setting up weekly one-hour sessions to help the PO work through the backlog, but the fundamental problem remained — you cannot do the PO’s work for them.

Eventually, Christian found himself filling in for the PO, which is itself an anti-pattern: the Scrum Master becoming the glue that holds the product together. The symptoms to watch for are clear: a PO who starts missing meetings, backlog items that remain unrefined, a PO who becomes physically or remotely distant, and — the biggest red flag — a Scrum Master who feels compelled to step in and do the PO’s job.

Self-reflection Question: Are there signs that your Product Owner is drifting away from the team, and have you caught yourself filling in gaps that aren’t yours to fill?

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About Christian Thordal

Christian Thordal is a former Danish Army officer turned Agile Coach. He works with leaders and teams to create clarity, accountability, and momentum in complex organizations. His approach blends military leadership principles with modern product development, helping organizations move from discussion and strategy to real execution and measurable results.

You can link with Christian Thordal on LinkedIn.

Christian Thordal: Structure Creates Freedom, How an Agile Coach Measures Success by Becoming Less Needed

“The less I shine and the more the team shines, the better I perform.” – Christian Thordal

Christian shares how his definition of success has fundamentally shifted over the years. Early in his career, the question was “How can I shine?” Today, it is the opposite — success means becoming invisible.

For Christian, a high-performing Scrum Master builds teams that no longer depend on them, much like raising a child to become a functional adult by eighteen. They can always call dad for coaching or to borrow money, but they can stand on their own. He illustrates this with a team he moved from what he calls “cowboy loose Kanban” to an adapted Scrum framework. The structure gave the team freedom: he can now miss dailies and planning sessions, and the team still produces a solid plan, sprint backlog, and sprint goal. He drops by to give pointers and encourage good behaviors.

Christian also highlights the importance of the Scrum Master and Product Owner partnership — “the mom and dad of the team” — and how building predictability and flow matters more than heroics. A key tactical insight: he created a one-pager roadmap for his domain leader showing issues, plans, milestones, and metrics.

This simple artifact gave leadership the comfort that things were under control, buying Christian the autonomy to do his best work. This proved critical when his team was decimated by departures in late 2025 — he hired new people, stabilized the group, and got them delivering again.

Self-reflection Question: What would it look like if your team could run a full sprint cycle without you present — and what is stopping that from happening today?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Four-Box Retrospective

Christian shares a retrospective format he calls the Four-Box Retrospective — a structured, pragmatic approach that resonates especially well with engineer-minded teams. The session begins with a team check-in to get the vibe in the room. Next, the team reviews last week’s agreements: who was accountable, and are those items still alive or handled?

Anything still alive moves forward automatically, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Then comes the core mechanic: topic creation divided into four boxes — Tech (tools and tech stacks), Team (issues within the team), Outside (external dependencies and blockers), and Parking Lot (everything else). Presenters explain their topics briefly to give context, and the group uses dot voting to surface the most pressing issues.

Discussion follows, with clear accountability assignments and action items written down. The pre-grouping into four boxes saves significant time by giving topics a natural home before discussion begins. Named owners for every action item create real progress between retrospectives. Christian values this format because it is grounded in actual operational problems — people can see the direct application of every conversation, which keeps engagement high and outcomes tangible.

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

About Christian Thordal

You can link with Christian Thordal on LinkedIn.

Christian Thordal: Managing Cross-Team Dependencies in Scaled Agile, From Planning to Real-Time Coordination

“When one team’s plan failed, the rest collapsed — deliveries and outcomes were delayed across the entire domain.” – Christian Thordal

In this episode, Christian Thordal shares the biggest challenge he faced as an Agile Coach working within a large Danish broadcast company’s technology division, where 32 teams operate across multiple domains.

Within his domain of 10 teams, they plan in three-month cycles using OKRs, but a critical blind spot kept undermining their results: nobody had a clear grasp of the dependencies between teams and sister domains.

When one team’s delivery slipped in a previous cycle, it triggered a cascade of failures across the organization. Christian and the agile coaching community escalated the issue to the portfolio and delivery department, pushing to synchronize cycle timing across domains. He introduced a “big room planning” approach within his domain to map out which teams they impact and who impacts them, structured around a three-week cadence: define OKRs, align, then commit.

A key coaching insight reshaped his thinking: dependencies are not facts — they are decisions. By naming the specific people involved (the person who needs resolution and the person who provides it), teams can manage dependencies in real-time rather than waiting for a program management layer that only addresses problems after escalation.

Christian now plans to establish dedicated coordination days during each cycle where teams actively collaborate and resolve dependency issues together.

Self-reflection Question: When dependencies between your teams cause delivery failures, do you treat them as coordination problems to solve in real-time, or do you wait for escalation through a management layer?

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

About Christian Thordal

You can link with Christian Thordal on LinkedIn.

Christian Thordal: How “Fake Kanban” Fooled the Metrics, And What This Agile Coach Did to Fix It

“The team was like birds in a nest waiting to get fed — completely dependent on the PO for every piece of work.” – Christian Thordal

Christian tells us about a team that always appeared busy but was hiding serious dysfunction behind a single healthy metric. When he rated the system across his domain, he found the team scored low in process maturity, effectiveness, and learning — yet their cycle time looked good.

The team claimed to practice Kanban, but in reality it meant “we can do whatever we want.” Daily standups had become social check-ins. The backlog held over 100 items to do and 50+ in progress, most of them just headlines with no descriptions. Real work assignments happened through 30-minute Slack huddles between the PO and individual developers — pure push, no prioritization.

Despite having OKRs, the team could only plan a week ahead. Christian’s fix was radical: he restarted the backlog entirely, cutting 150 items down to roughly 30, established WIP limits to create a pull-based system, and brought the team into the process as active participants rather than passive recipients.

In this segment, we refer to Kanban and OKRs.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you looked beyond a single “green” metric to understand what was really happening in your team’s workflow?

Featured Book of the Week: Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet

Christian recommends Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet, a former U.S. Navy submarine commander who transformed his crew’s performance by replacing permission-seeking with intent-based leadership. Instead of waiting for orders, crew members were expected to say “I intend to…” — transferring ownership and making people accountable for their decisions.

Christian says this deeply resonated with his own military background in the Danish Army, where leadership operated on similar principles. The book’s core message — stop creating dependency and start building leaders at every level — connects directly to the team story in this episode, where passive dependency on the PO was the root of the dysfunction.

You can also listen to previous episodes with David Marquet and explore more on intent-based leadership.

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

About Christian Thordal

You can link with Christian Thordal on LinkedIn.

Christian Thordal: When Applying Scrum By The Book Fails, Understanding Context Before Changing The System

“I treated Scrum like a military SOP — follow the book, execute the steps. But I failed to see that the context was really the tipping point. What looked like a problem was actually their solution.” – Christian Thordal

Christian shares a hard-won lesson from his time coaching three RPA teams at one of Denmark’s largest banks during the pandemic. He inherited teams running six-week sprints with half-hour planning sessions that amounted to little more than putting items on a calendar. As a former Danish Army officer, Christian’s instinct was to fix the obvious deviation from the Scrum Guide — the sprint length.

He advocated for shorter feedback loops and eventually convinced the Product Owner, who also served as the director, to try two-week sprints. The first planning session was a disaster.

There was yelling and scolding, and it became clear that the real problem had nothing to do with sprint length. The teams had no proper backlog. The six-week sprints actually worked because they gave teams enough time to go out to the business, discover work, and deliver it within a single cycle.

Christian realized he had been applying Scrum mechanically without understanding how work entered the system. He started attending business analyst and PO meetings, uncovered the backlog gap, and helped the teams build a proper one. His key insight: what looks like a symptom can actually be a pragmatic solution to real constraints. Understand the system before you change it.

In this episode, we refer to the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you assumed a team’s practice was wrong, only to discover it was a reasonable adaptation to their context? How might you investigate the “why” behind existing processes before proposing changes?

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

About Christian Thordal

You can link with Christian Thordal on LinkedIn.