Gunnar Fischer Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Gunnar Fischer: From Staying in Your Line to The Connected Product Owner—Two Patterns Every Scrum Master Should Recognize

The Great Product Owner: The Connected PO Who Makes Information Flow

“This Product Owner didn’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but everybody knew, okay, this is a really smart guy.” – Gunnar Fischer

The best Product Owner Gunnar ever worked with was what he calls the connected PO. This person had a deep professional network—inside the company and with the customer—and could talk to anyone: a colleague, the client, a brand-new team member they were onboarding. They were socially sharp without being shallow.

They could disagree clearly, even harshly, and then turn around and say, “now let’s talk about something else,” with kindness. When this PO said no, it was a no people respected; when they said yes, it was a yes people trusted, because everyone knew the PO could push back. The praise behind their back matched the praise in the room.

They had a private life, too—not married to the job, which made them a more well-rounded human. But the specifically Product Owner skill Gunnar names is this: they could look at the product across different time horizons—what does it need to do in one month, three months, one year—and they kept juggling functionality, contracts, customer situation, and economic reality at the same time.

Their technical background helped, but they understood the line: “It’s not my job to be the technically most savvy guy, but I’m willing to share my knowledge with everybody.” As Gunnar puts it, the difference between a subject matter expert and a Product Owner is that the Product Owner makes the information flow.

Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner make information flow across the team, the customer, and management—or are they hoarding context as the “expert”?

The Bad Product Owner: The Stay-in-Your-Line, Accept-Your-Fate PO

“You manage the backlog, you do the customer calls, you write the user stories—but you were not involved in any of the bigger decisions.” – Gunnar Fischer

The anti-pattern Gunnar sees most often isn’t malice—it’s resignation. Most Product Owners aren’t given the access or the permissions they need to be successful, and so they accept their fate.

They manage the backlog, take the customer calls, write the user stories, sometimes talk to management—but they aren’t part of the bigger decisions: ROI on a feature, whether to build it at all, the product vision a year out. Management keeps those decisions to itself, and the accept-your-fate PO doesn’t challenge that arrangement. They stay in their line. They don’t push back when sales drops in an urgent request that ruins the plan. They don’t challenge the developers when an estimate feels wrong. They become very protective of the things they can control—their privileges, their processes, the artifacts—and when the bad times come, they get thrown under the bus.

Gunnar’s diagnosis is direct: the role of a great PO is to have constructive, respectful disagreements at every level—with the client, with management, with the team—and to be okay disappointing people. “Once you see that people go down to the mechanics, then it’s a really bad smell, I would say.” Saying yes to everything doesn’t make you safe; it makes you replaceable.

In this segment, we refer to Geoff Watts’ Scrum Mastery and its line about the great Scrum Master being dispensable and wanted—a frame that applies to Product Owners just as well.

Self-reflection Question: Where in the past month did your Product Owner say “yes” when the right answer was a respectful “no, not yet”?

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About Gunnar Fischer

Gunnar is the leader of the Chocolate Guild. Agile practitioner with a software developer background and a strong interest in people, intercultural contacts and the bigger picture. Gunnar’s purpose is to teach and to learn, to grow as a person and to support others who want the same.

You can link with Gunnar Fischer on LinkedIn.

You can also read Gunnar’s writing on his blog, Leader of the Chocolate Guild.

Gunnar Fischer: Healthy Flow of Value in a Healthy Work Environment—The Ecosystem Definition of Success

“A successful Scrum Master is healthy flow of value in a healthy work environment.” – Gunnar Fischer

Gunnar’s definition of success comes in one phrase that hides a lot of work: healthy flow of value in a healthy work environment.

The work environment, he says, is an ecosystem—it doesn’t have tigers, but it has plenty of layers and forces that can throw the balance off. You start at the team: are we reaching our goals most of the time? (If always, you might be playing too safe.) Then you move outward to the customer: who are we doing this work for, and are they succeeding?

Then to the company: what’s good for the customer might still be bad for the financials. And finally back to the individual: a team can be hitting its goals, the customer can be happy, the company can be making money, and a person on the team can still be quietly under-challenged and ready to leave.

Gunnar measures the flow side with the four Kanban guide metrics—cycle time, throughput, work item age, and work in progress—but he keeps reminding himself that finishing isn’t the same as getting feedback.

Did the customer use what we built? He’s been demotivated more than once by seeing a “very important” piece of work go untouched after delivery. And then there’s the social side: the level of healthy, constructive disagreement, and reading the room when colleagues from a culture that doesn’t say “no” go silent.

In this episode, we refer to Kanban flow metrics (cycle time, throughput, work item age, WIP) and the importance of treating the backlog as options, not promises.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you measured not whether the team finished something, but whether the customer actually used it?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: What, So What, Now What?

Gunnar’s favorite retrospective format is What, So What, Now What?, one of the Liberating Structures (and free to read up on online). He used it after a tense production deployment that succeeded but left the team rattled. Instead of jumping to “we need to do exactly this,” he forced the team to split their thinking: what are the facts we can describe, so what is our interpretation of those facts, and now what are the possible options going forward.

Sounds simple. But the brain hates incomplete pictures—it auto-completes them with speculation. That instinct kept our ancestors alive when they couldn’t see the full tiger behind the bushes; it ruins our reasoning at work.

By making the team distinguish hard between fact and interpretation, the format produced three concrete ideas. Within three months, the team had implemented all three, and things improved.

Gunnar’s broader takeaway about retrospectives: don’t run them right after the event (“get a coffee, step away from your desk for fifteen minutes”), don’t wait two months either, and—above all—“people need to look like winners when they’re going into a difficult retrospective.” Then honor their time by following up. If nobody else does the follow-up, the Scrum Master has to be the reminder.

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

About Gunnar Fischer

You can link with Gunnar Fischer on LinkedIn.

You can also read Gunnar’s writing on his blog, Leader of the Chocolate Guild.

Gunnar Fischer: Three Transformations at Once—How to Build Momentum When Everyone Is Exhausted

“You’re not only writing for the leadership—you’re always writing for the gallery.” – Gunnar Fischer

Gunnar brought a juicy challenge to Wednesday: his company is running three transformations in parallel, at three different levels, all at different stages and degrees of success. People are exhausted. The word “change” triggers an allergic reaction. And yet, in the same breath, those same people will tell you the organization needs to change.

So how do you create momentum in a climate worn down by theater and abandoned initiatives, when the managers who launched them have moved on?

Gunnar’s first insight is that the human species is built for change—the problem isn’t appetite, it’s the feeling of not being heard. Even hinting “I think I know your situation, and I took a note from our last conversation” opens people up. Vasco pushes the analysis further: when three transformation teams each visit the same Scrum team with different topics, the team ends up spending all its time discussing transformation instead of doing the work.

Gunnar’s counter is simple math—be realistic that 90% of capacity is work and 10% is learning, plan accordingly, and start small with a single pilot team. He recalls one successful turnaround driven by a “wall of concerns” where leaders read out anonymous worries and answered them publicly. The response didn’t need to be perfect; it just needed to exist.

And the hidden lever is – for example – when you ask a good question in a town hall, you’re not really aiming at leadership; you’re showing hundreds of colleagues “you’re not the only one.” That’s where systemic change actually starts.

In this episode, we refer to Liberating Structures, which Gunnar uses heavily in his change work, and the importance of linking transformation work to bottom-line financials or capability metrics so it survives the next urgent customer request.

Self-reflection Question: In your current change initiative, what visible evidence do people have that leadership is actually listening—not just communicating?

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

About Gunnar Fischer

You can link with Gunnar Fischer on LinkedIn.

You can also read Gunnar’s writing on his blog, Leader of the Chocolate Guild.

Gunnar Fischer: The Anti-Pattern Bingo Team—When Success Is a Zero-Sum Game

“This was neither Scrum, nor a team. It was more like the anti-pattern bingo team.” – Gunnar Fischer

When Gunnar took his first job abroad, he walked straight into what he calls the “anti-pattern bingo team”—a supposed Scrum team that was neither Scrum nor a team. The company was in trouble, the team had a bad reputation and was used as a punching bag, the manager-of-manager treated them like a stepchild, and the new manager didn’t seem to know what he had signed up for. The team members themselves didn’t really want to work together.

The goals slipped. Decisions were made in back rooms, outside the official meetings. And underneath it all sat the most corrosive belief Gunnar names: that success is a zero-sum game—if you win, I lose. With that mindset, there is no team, just individuals defending turf.

One pattern stuck with him so clearly he gave it a name: sandcastle planning. The team would finish a Sprint planning, agree on a goal, and the manager would walk in right after the meeting and overturn the whole thing with his own priorities.

Over time, the team stopped putting effort into planning. Why build the castle if someone will trample it? Even worse, when an escalation finally surfaced, Gunnar—an immigrant—was told that as a German, he must be “very authoritarian.” A label, served up as analysis. That was the moment he knew the team would never have safe disagreements, never reach the right level of challenge, never recover.

In this segment, we talk about the corrosive effect of treating people as labels, and how the absence of an explicit reason for the team’s existence makes everything else collapse.

Self-reflection Question: Does your team have a clear, explicit reason for existing—or are you just a group that shares a technology, a building, or a reporting line?

Featured Book of the Week: Scrum Mastery (2nd Edition) by Geoff Watts

For Gunnar, the book that shaped him most as a Scrum Master is Scrum Mastery (2nd Edition) by Geoff Watts—what he calls “the noble knight of Scrum books.” He first read it just after a Scrum course and thought, “What should I even do with this kind of wisdom?”

Years later he came back to it and understood. A few years after that, he became modest about it: these are truths, but it’s about making them true—and watching for when they aren’t. The book is full of phrases like “a good Scrum Master is indispensable; a great Scrum Master is dispensable and wanted.” That last line captured it perfectly for him: success isn’t being unneeded, it’s being chosen.

As Gunnar puts it: “In times when everybody is challenged and people are making fun of agile practitioners, this brings back all of the ideals of what a Scrum Master is really about.” You can also listen to our previous episode with Geoff Watts on the podcast.

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

About Gunnar Fischer

You can link with Gunnar Fischer on LinkedIn.

You can also read Gunnar’s writing on his blog, Leader of the Chocolate Guild.

Gunnar Fischer: Accepting Not Being Accepted—The People-Pleasing Trap That Broke a Scrum Master

“I accepted not being accepted, and that was a big failure.” – Gunnar Fischer

Gunnar’s biggest failure wasn’t a single bad decision—it was an attitude he carried into work for far too long. As an Agile coach and Scrum Master, he watched a new high-ranking manager arrive who didn’t like the team, didn’t respect them, never even officially introduced herself. And Gunnar did the worst possible thing: he played along.

He did the people-pleasing dance without ever getting feedback, recognition, or even a basic conversation. He formed ideas as a team, did the work, asked for nothing back—and accepted that nobody looked at the work. In hindsight, the Scrum value of respect was the missing piece.

“The members of a Scrum team respect each other to be capable, independent people, and are also respected as such by the others.” Gunnar respected others. He did not demand that respect for himself. The wake-up came in Ecuador—swimming with sharks in the open sea, he realized he felt safer there than in his own office. So he updated his CV, took an internal switch, and finally stepped out of victim mode.

His real insight is uncomfortable: if you read about something good—getting time for your own development, being heard, being respected—and you instinctively deflect it or make excuses for why you can’t have it, that’s a very clear indicator you’ve internalized being small.

In this episode, we refer to The Coach’s Casebook by Geoff Watts, specifically the chapter on people-pleasing.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time someone described a healthy professional environment to you, and you found yourself making excuses for why you couldn’t have it?

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

About Gunnar Fischer

You can link with Gunnar Fischer on LinkedIn.

You can also read Gunnar’s writing on his blog, Leader of the Chocolate Guild.