Discovery Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Natalia Curusi: From Spreadsheets to Discovery—Helping POs Make the Transition

The Great Product Owner: Taking Ownership and Coaching the Team Forward

“That person was not just a great product owner, but a great coach—he had excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, and he coached myself as a Scrum Master, showing me how product ownership should look like.” – Natalia Curusi

Natalia worked with a Product Owner who embodied everything the role should be. He didn’t come from a technical background, but he possessed exceptional domain knowledge, outstanding communication skills, and stakeholder management expertise you rarely find in one person. What made him truly remarkable was that he coached everyone around him, including Natalia as the Scrum Master.

He demonstrated full empowerment and ownership—making decisions himself rather than constantly escalating to higher management. When risks needed to be taken, he took them with courage and conviction. The team trusted him completely because he balanced business needs with team capacity, always understanding what they could realistically achieve. Over the past five years, this person has been promoted multiple times and now serves as a global director of product, still with the same company.

When Natalia thinks about what great product ownership looks like, she thinks of him—someone who combined technical understanding with coaching ability, took genuine ownership of outcomes, and empowered the team through clear vision and decisive leadership. These are exactly the skills that are hardest to find in the market, yet when you find them, the impact is transformative for the entire organization.

Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner take ownership and make decisions, or do they constantly escalate to higher management, preventing the team from moving forward with confidence?

The Bad Product Owner: Assigned Without Training, Support, or Willingness

“She was a great subject matter expert with deep domain knowledge, but the organization assigned her the product owner role without her willingness, without training, and while she was already 80% loaded with other responsibilities.” – Natalia Curusi

Natalia encountered a Product Owner anti-pattern that reveals a systemic organizational failure. The person was an exceptional subject matter expert with incredible domain knowledge, but when the organization decided to adopt Agile, they assigned her the PO role like sticking a label on a box—no training, no consent, no preparation. She was already working at 80% capacity on other responsibilities and had no understanding of what product ownership meant. Frustrated and overwhelmed, she approached the role from a command-and-control mindset. At the project start, she brought a massive spreadsheet of requirements, expecting the team to implement them sequentially.

The team tried a different approach, wanting to understand problems before discussing solutions, but the PO surprised everyone by re-introducing the spreadsheet in a later meeting—a clear sign of misalignment and broken trust. Natalia, recognizing this was a battle she couldn’t win without organizational support, chose to manage the relationship rather than create open conflict. She worked to mediate between the PO’s spreadsheet approach and the team’s need for discovery and iterative development. The real anti-pattern wasn’t the individual—it was the organization assigning critical roles without providing training, time, or psychological safety. This situation illustrates why product ownership fails: not from bad people, but from bad systems that set people up to fail.

Self-reflection Question: When you see a struggling Product Owner, are you addressing the individual’s behavior or the systemic conditions that set them up to fail in the first place?

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About Natalia Curusi

With over 20 years in software delivery, Natalia Curusi is an expert in Agile Transformations, Delivery Optimisation, and Systems Thinking. As an Agile Coach at Endava, she leads Asia Pacific initiatives, driving business agility and continuous improvement while mentoring teams to build customer-centric, high-performing, and collaborative cultures.

You can link with Natalia Curusi on LinkedIn.

You can also follow Natalia on Twitter.

Alidad Hamidi: When Product Owners Facilitate Vision Instead of Owning It

The Great Product Owner: Co-Creating Vision Through Discovery

“The best product owner I worked with was not a product owner, but a project manager. And she didn’t realize that she’s acting as a product owner.” – Alidad Hamidi

The irony wasn’t lost on Alidad. The best Product Owner he ever worked with didn’t have “Product Owner” in her title—she was a project manager who didn’t even realize she was acting in that capacity. The team was working on a strategic project worth millions, but confusion reigned about what value they were creating. Alidad planned an inception workshop to create alignment among stakeholders, marketing, operations, advisors, and the team.

Twenty minutes into the session, Alidad asked a simple question: “How do we know the customer has this problem, and they’re gonna pay for it?” Silence. No one knew. To her immense credit, the project manager didn’t retreat or deflect. Instead, she jumped in: “What do we need to do?” Alidad suggested assumptions mapping, and two days later, the entire team and stakeholders gathered for the workshop. What happened next was magic. “She didn’t become a proxy,” Alidad emphasizes. She didn’t say, “I’ll go find out and come back to you.” Instead, she brought everyone together—team, stakeholders, and customers—into the same room.

The results were dramatic. The team was about to invest millions integrating with an external vendor. Through the assumption mapping workshop, they uncovered huge risks and realized customers didn’t actually want that solution. “We need to pivot,” she declared. Instead of the expensive integration, they developed educational modules and scripts for customer support and advisors. The team sat with advisors, listening to actual customer calls, creating solutions based on real needs rather than assumptions. The insight transformed not just the project but the project manager herself. She took these discovery practices across the entire organization, teaching everyone how to conduct proper discovery and fundamentally shifting the product development paradigm. One person, willing to facilitate rather than dictate, made this impact. “Product owner can facilitate creation of that [vision],” Alidad explains. “It’s not just product owner or a team. It’s the broader stakeholder and customer community that need to co-create that.”

Self-reflection Question: Are you facilitating the creation of vision with your stakeholders and customers, or are you becoming a proxy between the team and the real sources of insight?

The Bad Product Owner: Creating Barriers Instead of Connections

“He did the opposite, just creating barriers between the team and the environment.” – Alidad Hamidi

The Product Owner was new to the organization, technically skilled, and genuinely well-intentioned. The team was developing solutions for clinicians—complex healthcare work requiring deep domain understanding. Being new, the PO naturally leaned into his strength: technical expertise. He spent enormous amounts of time with the team, drilling into details, specifying exactly how everything should look, and giving the team ready-made solutions instead of problems to solve.

Alidad kept telling him: “Mate, you need to spend more time with our stakeholder, you need to understand their perspective.” But the PO didn’t engage with users or stakeholders. He stayed comfortable in his technical wheelhouse, designing solutions in isolation. The results were predictable and painful. Halfway through work, the PO would realize, “Oh, we really don’t need that.” Or worse, the team would complete something and deliver it to crickets—no one used it because no one wanted it. “Great person, but it created a really bad dynamic,” Alidad reflects. What should have been the PO’s job—understanding the environment, stakeholder needs, and market trends—never happened. Instead of putting people in front of the environment to learn and adapt, he created barriers between the team and reality.

Years later, Alidad’s perspective has matured. He initially resented this PO but came to realize: “He was just being human, and he didn’t have the right support and the environment for him.” Sometimes people learn only after making mistakes. The coaching opportunity isn’t to shame or blame but to focus on reflection from failures and supporting learning. Alidad encouraged forums with stakeholders where the PO and team could interact directly, seeing each other’s work and constraints. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s creating conditions where Product Owners can connect teams to customers rather than standing between them.

Self-reflection Question: What barriers might you be unintentionally creating between your team and the customers or stakeholders they need to serve, and what would it take to remove yourself from the middle?

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About Alidad Hamidi

Alidad is a strategic advisor in human-centred transformation, focused on organisational design for autonomy, ownership, and impact. A recovering Agility Coach, he draws on years across delivery and coaching roles to help build organisations truly fit for humans—resilient, adaptive, and designed for people, not just processes.

You can link with Alidad Hamidi on LinkedIn. You can also visit his website at desirablefutures.group.

Alina Thapliyal: Finding Scrum Master Success in Empowering Teams through Personal Connection

Our personal experiences will shape the approach we take to the role of the Scrum Master. Alina recalls her childhood where she always had the urge to motivate people around her. Later in life she never lost the drive to help people find their potential. As a Scrum Master, she believes that it is important to remember that before being a leader in any capacity, one is a human being and therefore, it’s essential to bring our humanity to work. She suggests starting with small acts of kindness, such as being there for your team when they need you, creating a kudos board to show appreciation, and conducting a discovery type of meeting to focus on personal and team strengths and motivation. The goal is to remind the team of their strengths and overcome the fear of problems.

Featured Retrospectives Format for the Week: Changing up the retrospective, by rotating the facilitator

In this segment, Alina highlights the importance of alternating between different types of retrospectives to keep things fresh and engaging. At times, a prepared template can be helpful, while at other times, an open conversation with very little formality, may be the best option. Alina also suggests that sometimes, it’s better to just give the team time, as there are situations when people need time to understand a problem. When focusing on enabling an open conversation, and deciding on the topic of the retrospective, Alina suggests collecting topics during the sprint and bringing them to the retrospective. To add even more dynamism, and creativity to the retrospective, we can also rotate the facilitator role, as that bring many different perspectives to the conversation.

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About Alina Thapliyal

Alina 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.