“I can’t change people, but I can definitely involve them.” – Njegos Ilic
This is a Product Owner week, where we interview Njegos Ilic, a product owner, and cover the same topics we usually cover, but from the PO perspective!
Njegos describes a pattern he’s encountered multiple times as a product owner: teams where engagement is almost nonexistent. He walks into a refinement session, presents ideas, asks for feedback — and gets crickets. Nobody pushes back, nobody asks questions, nobody challenges the assumptions. The result is a product owner working in isolation, defining everything alone, only to discover gaps during development that could have been caught early with a single conversation.
Njegos is honest about the limits of what any one person can do — you can’t change people’s personalities, and expecting a Scrum Master to do so is unrealistic. But what you can do is involve people. His approach when joining a new team: don’t come in announcing how things will work. Instead, learn how the team already works, meet them where they are, and then find ways to fit new concepts into their existing rhythm. For the non-negotiable things — the red lines — he’s precise, open, and always provides an alternative rather than just pushing his way.
In this segment, we talk about Discovery and Delivery and the Product Trio concept.
Self-reflection Question: When you join a team meeting and get silence instead of feedback, do you assume agreement — or do you treat it as a signal that something deeper needs to change?
Featured Book of the Week: Inspired by Marty Cagan
Njegos recommends Inspired by Marty Cagan as the book that most shaped his approach to product ownership. He highlights the entire SVPG series — including Empowered and Transformed (available as the Product is Hard SVPG Box Set) — but points to the Product Trio concept as especially powerful.
As Njegos puts it, the Product Trio — bringing together a product manager, a tech lead, and a designer — removes the hand-off mentality where each discipline works in isolation. Instead of the product owner defining everything alone and handing it to the team, the trio shapes problems together during discovery, so that by the time work reaches the team, there’s shared understanding of why they’re building something, not just what to build.
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About Njegos Ilic
Njegos is a motivated and forward-thinking Product Manager and Agile Project Manager with experience in fast-paced SaaS environments. He empowers teams through leadership and guidance across product development. With a Lean mindset, he simplifies complexity, delivers in small, testable increments, and leverages rapid feedback loops to prioritize outcomes over output.
You can link with Njegos Ilic on LinkedIn.
Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at
Karina Margole is an Agile Coach with over a decade of experience, based in the UK. She has ADHD and a passion for creating an environment where everyone can do their best work. Karina approaches her work with a holistic, systemic view while also paying attention to individuals on a personal level.