decision making Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Olaitan Fashanu: The Product Owner Who Doesn’t Care vs the PO Who Always Has the Answer

In this episode, we refer to a recurring theme in past podcast episodes—the proxy product owner who can’t make decisions because they’re not theirs to make.

The Great Product Owner: Always Available, Always Decisive, Always Has the Context

“There was nothing you tell, any questions you have about a particular feature that this guy doesn’t have an answer to. And that really moved the team so fast.” – Olaitan Fashanu

The best PO Olaitan ever worked with was the mirror opposite of every anti-pattern he’d seen. Deeply involved in refinement. Took backlog management seriously. Always brought the context.

Always available to the team. And—maybe most importantly—always ready to make a decision when devs surfaced trade-offs. The team could ask any question about any feature, and the answer was right there.

Not “let me check,” not “I’ll get back to you,” not “what do you think?”—a decision. That single quality, Olaitan says, was what moved the team faster than anything else. As a Scrum Master, when you see a great PO at work, you also see the amplifying waves of impact: motivation rises, quality rises, ownership grows. Olaitan’s takeaway is sharp: the success of our job depends on how well the product owner does theirs.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time your PO made a real-time decision that unblocked the team in a single conversation—and what’s preventing that from being the norm?

The Bad Product Owner: Doesn’t Care About Impact, Can’t Make Decisions

“The product owner cares about delivery. We just need to release to the customer. That is something I don’t like.” – Olaitan Fashanu

Olaitan describes two anti-patterns wrapped into one bad-PO type. The first: the PO who doesn’t care about the impact of their work on the team. Tickets dropped without context. No refinement. No problem framing. Just “ship by end of month.” The data shows up in Jira if you’re paying attention—patterns of churn, quality issues, customer complaints, slow market response.

Beyond the numbers, the team loses motivation, frustration creeps in, and eventually you lose the team entirely. The second anti-pattern, layered on top: the PO who can’t make decisions. Developers come back with two options and the trade-offs—and the PO can’t pick one.

Vasco connects it to the proxy PO pattern explored in past episodes—a PO whose decisions aren’t actually theirs to make. The cost is the same either way: the team stalls, ownership erodes, and stakeholder conflict grows.

In this segment, we refer to the proxy PO anti-pattern explored in earlier episodes of the podcast.

Self-reflection Question: Is your PO unable to decide—or unable to be allowed to decide? The difference changes which conversation you need to have, and with whom.

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About Olaitan Fashanu

Olaitan Fashanu is a customer-focused professional with expertise in product management, technology, and coaching. He drives digital and agile transformation, builds collaborative cross-functional teams, and delivers high-quality products across markets. Curious and strategic, he explores AI and data intelligence while balancing technical depth, business goals, culture, structure, and long-term vision.

You can link with Olaitan Fashanu on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Why the People Track Exists — And What It Will Help You See at GAS26

The Global Agile Summit kicks off on May 4th, and the People track is one of the most loaded lineups this year. In this episode, track co-hosts Pete Oliver-Krueger and Alina Thapliyal share the story behind the track, the sessions they’re most excited about, and why — in a world increasingly focused on technology and AI — the people dimension is more critical than ever.

The Story Behind the People Track

“Every transformation still comes down to how people feel, how they communicate, how they work with each other, how decisions are made, and how leaders can create a space and conditions for them to thrive.”

The People track isn’t new to the Global Agile Summit — it’s been part of the event for several years, sometimes combined with the Product track. But this year, the volume and quality of submissions made it clear that the topic deserves its own dedicated space. Alina frames it in terms of the VUCA world we operate in: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity make the people dimension more important, not less. Pete picks up the thread with a sharper edge — as AI and technology increasingly dominate the conversation, it’s easy to lose sight of the people creating, designing, using, and selling the products. That tension is exactly why he wrote Shift: From Product to People with his co-author Michael. The book exists to pull practitioners out of product-as-a-thing thinking and into product-as-people thinking.

Product as a Thing vs. Product as People

“When we lose sight of the people around the product is when things start to suffer.”

When Pete reviewed the track submissions, he noticed a telling pattern — a divergence that confirmed the track’s reason for existing. Many submissions talked about product as an artifact, focused on deliverables and outcomes, with no connection to the humans involved. Then there was a second group that immediately saw themselves in the People track. Pete explains the dynamic: we all start by caring about people and solving problems, but at some point we pick a solution and the work of getting it done becomes all-consuming. The task becomes the goal and the people become objects. Unless we consciously leave space to think about relationships and human dynamics, we drift into laser focus on things. The sessions in this track are designed to be the antidote.

Marcus Bullock’s Keynote — A People-First Success Story

“It’s so inspiring to just listen to it and think that I can also do it. We can give people a second chance. We can focus on what’s good and increase the good, rather than focus on what’s bad.”

Both Alina and Pete highlighted Marcus Bullock’s keynote as a must-watch. Marcus, CEO of Flikshop, started from a deeply difficult place and built his way to leading a business and empowering others. What makes his story stand out isn’t the arc from adversity to success — it’s the honesty. Pete, who has known Marcus for over 15 years, points out that Marcus’s story includes genuine ups and downs, and his people-first approach is what helped him weather all of them. Alina was struck by the energy Marcus brings and his focus on amplifying what’s good in people rather than minimizing what’s bad. It’s a message that resonates whether you lead a team of five or an organization of five thousand.

Usability Theater — The Courage to Shut Up and Listen

“Take a product, give it to a customer, and don’t say anything. Just let the customer try it, let the customer experience the product. We need to have the courage to shut up.”

Alina’s second highlight was the session on usability theater, where the core idea is deceptively simple: put your product in front of a customer and resist the urge to explain anything. No “look what we did here,” no guided tour. Just observe how people actually interact with what you’ve built. It takes real courage, Alina says, because our instinct is to showcase and defend our work. But the insights you gain from silence and observation are worth far more than the comfort of narration. This is one of those sessions that sounds simple but could change how you run your next product review or demo.

Agency — Breaking the Permission Loop

“There is a necessity to understand ourselves and have some of this confidence, but that’s true for everybody, even our leaders. They may be stuck in permission loops with their own bosses.”

Tara Scott’s session on agency and breaking the permission loop touched a nerve for both hosts. Alina shared that in companies she’s worked for, drawn-out decision processes wasted resources and drove people to leave. Tara’s session tackles how to empower people to actually make decisions. Pete adds a crucial nuance: the permission loop isn’t just a top-down problem. Leaders are stuck in their own permission loops too. Everyone in the chain faces the same challenge, and the solution can’t be found in a vacuum — it requires understanding where each person is coming from and building flexibility across the team and organization. If this topic hits close to home, Tara is also doing a live Q&A during the summit.

Neurodiversity, Jeff Patton, and the Full Lineup

“Every time I have a conversation with Jeff Patton, it just goes in all kinds of directions, and I have so much fun.”

Pete flagged two more sessions worth watching. The neurodiversity session with Anita promises to open up a topic that deserves more airtime in the agile community — how different minds experience and contribute to team dynamics. And Jeff Patton, whose conversations with Pete apparently never follow a straight line, brings his signature blend of product thinking and people awareness. The full track covers a wide range: trust, leadership, inclusion, decision-making, neurodiversity. As Alina puts it, these topics are universal — they’re about human behavior, and that’s valuable in any field where you work with people.

A New Lens for Monday Morning

“I think people can take away from the track the ability to see other dynamics in their workplace that maybe they currently aren’t spending a lot of time paying attention to, or didn’t even realize were there.”

When asked what attendees will walk away with, both Alina and Pete landed on the same metaphor: a new lens. Alina described it as a better understanding of how human dynamics shape culture and performance, paired with practical tips that can be applied immediately — no theory, just real-life stories from real practitioners. Pete took the metaphor further, comparing it to putting on night vision goggles. After watching these sessions, you’ll start noticing dynamics you’d been walking past every day — relationship patterns, permission loops, communication gaps. And with that new visibility comes influence. You’ll realize you have more ability to shape your environment than you thought, simply because you can now see what was always there.

About Pete Oliver-Krueger and Alina Thapliyal

Pete Oliver-Krueger is an Executive Coach with the Library of Agile, and co-author of the book “Shift: From Product to People”, a novel that tells the complex story of how leading “people-first” is required to solve tomorrow’s biggest problems.

You can link with Pete Oliver-Krueger on LinkedIn, and visit Pete OK’s website at https://www.shiftingpeople.com/.

Alina Thapliyal is the Scrum Master for a team within the public sector. Her aspiration is to become an agile coach. She grew up in Romania and has been living in Germany for 13 years. She loves jogging, reading and actively listening to people’s life stories.

You can link with Alina Thapliyal on LinkedIn.

AI Assisted Coding: Beyond AI Code Assistants: How Moldable Development Answers Questions AI Can’t With Tudor Girba

In this BONUS episode, we explore Moldable Development with Tudor Girba, CEO of feenk.com and creator of the Glamorous Toolkit. We dive into why developers spend over 50% of their time reading code—not because they want to, but because they lack the answers they need. Tudor shares how building contextual tools can transform software development, making systems truly understandable and enabling decisions at the speed of thought.

The Hidden System: A Telco’s Three-Year Quest

“They had a system consisting of five boxes, but they could only enumerate four. If this is your level of awareness about what is reality around you, you have almost no chance of systematically affecting that reality.”

Tudor opens with a striking case study from a telecommunications company that spent three years and hundreds of person-years trying to optimize a data pipeline. Despite massive effort and executive mandate, the pipeline still took exactly one day to process data—no improvement whatsoever. When Tudor’s team investigated, they asked for an architecture diagram. The team drew four boxes representing their system. But when Tudor’s team started building tools to mirror this architecture back from the actual code, they discovered something shocking: there was an entire fifth system between the first and second boxes that nobody knew existed. This missing system was likely the bottleneck they’d been trying to optimize for three years.

Why Reading Code Doesn’t Scale

“Developers spend more than 50% of their time reading code. The problem is that our systems are typically larger than anyone can read, and by the time you finish reading, the system has already changed many times.”

The real issue isn’t the time spent reading—it’s that reading is the most manual, least scalable way to extract information from systems. When developers read code, they’re actually trying to answer questions so they can make decisions. But a 250,000-line system would take one person-month to read at high speed, and the system changes constantly during that time. This means everything you learned yesterday becomes merely a hypothesis, not a reliable answer. The fundamental problem is that we cannot perceive anything in a software system except through tools, yet we’ve never made how we read code an explicit, optimizable activity.

The Context Problem: Why Generic Tools Fail

“Software is highly contextual, which means we can predict classes of problems people will have, but we cannot predict specific problems people will have.” Continue reading AI Assisted Coding: Beyond AI Code Assistants: How Moldable Development Answers Questions AI Can’t With Tudor Girba

BONUS: Captain David Marquet’s Guide to Becoming Your Own Best Coach

In this BONUS episode, we explore Captain David Marquet’s latest book “Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions.” Captain Marquet, renowned for transforming the USS Santa Fe from the worst-performing submarine to the best in the fleet, shares powerful insights on psychological distancing and how stepping outside ourselves can dramatically improve our decision-making abilities.

Make sure you also check the previous episode with Captain Marquet, where we discuss the key lessons from his book: Turn The Ship Around! A very often referred book on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.

The Genesis of Distancing

“What I really needed was people to think, not just comply, not just do what they were told.”

Captain Marquet traces the origins of his distancing concept back to his submarine experience. After realizing that giving orders gave people “a pass on thinking,” he developed a system where crew members would say “I intend to…” instead of waiting for commands. However, he noticed that officers would sometimes make decisions that were good for their department but not optimal for the submarine as a whole. This led him to ask different questions – like having the engineer sit in the captain’s chair and think from that perspective. The breakthrough came when he started asking himself, “What would my six-month-from-now self want me to do today?”

The Three B’s of Better Decision Making

“The problem with your decision making isn’t gathering more market data. The problem is your internal, your egoic biases that just come from the fact that you view the decision from inside your own head.”

Marquet introduces the “3 B’s of better decision making”: Be someone else, be somewhere else, be sometime else. These psychological distancing techniques help overcome the limitations of our “immersed self” – the version of us trapped in immediate pressures, deadlines, and ego-driven concerns. When we distance ourselves temporally (thinking as our future self), socially (thinking as someone else), or spatially (imagining being somewhere else), we access what psychologists call our “distanced self,” which aligns more closely with our ideal self and core values.

The Jeff Bezos Example

“When I’m 80, when am I going to regret more? Am I going to regret trying this idea and failing or not trying the idea?” Continue reading BONUS: Captain David Marquet’s Guide to Becoming Your Own Best Coach

Florian Georgescu: How Decision Journals Can Transform Product Owner Behavior

The Great Product Owner: The Humble Learner

Florian describes a Product Owner who started from scratch with business knowledge but no PO experience. This exemplary PO demonstrated transparency and engagement in their communication style, showed humility in recognizing knowledge gaps, and actively built strong relationships with the team. They used practical tools like a Product Canvas shared with the team, implemented “Story Time Tuesdays” for informal refinement sessions, and introduced feature learning cards to assess impact and learn from completed work. This PO’s success came from embracing the learning journey openly and creating collaborative environments where both they and the team could grow together.

The Bad Product Owner: The Command-and-Control Controller

Florian encountered a Product Owner who transitioned from 20 years in project management, bringing a command-and-control style that frustrated the development team. Despite having good business and technical knowledge, this PO made technical decisions for the team without allowing input, particularly challenging since they were in a different location. Florian addressed this through a “decision journal” experiment over three sprints, documenting every product decision and analyzing their impact during retrospectives. This approach served as a powerful mirror, clearly showing that technical decisions made without team input produced poor results, ultimately helping both the PO and team recognize the importance of collaborative decision-making.

Self-reflection Question: How does your Product Owner balance their expertise with the team’s input, and what tools could help improve this collaboration?

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About Florian Georgescu

Florian is a seasoned Agile Coach with 10+ years of experience guiding teams across startups to large enterprises. He specializes in tailoring workflows, mentoring Scrum Masters, and fostering collaboration. Passionate about continuous improvement, Florian helps organizations boost agility and align delivery with strategic goals for lasting impact.

You can link with Florian Georgescu on LinkedIn.