Iryna Stelmakh Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Iryna Stelmakh: The Firewall Product Owner, Turning PO Anti-Patterns Into Opportunities for Growth

The Great Product Owner: Market-Oriented and Vision-Driven

“Great product owners don’t just manage backlog items — they own the product vision and make sure the team understands how their work creates real value.” — Iryna Stelmakh

Iryna describes the best product owners she’s worked with through three qualities. First, they understand the market and the users deeply. Second, they can explain the business logic behind decisions — not just what to build, but why it matters. Third, they work closely with the team and treat them as partners in solving problems, not executors of tasks. The best PO Iryna worked with was responsible for sharing the business mindset, giving the team perspective and the possibility to contribute beyond the technical work. Everything was organized around a shared goal, and the team understood how their work created real value. As Vasco observes, when a PO just drops tasks without explaining why they matter, the team becomes “just a pair of hands.” Great product owners create allegiance through understanding.

Self-reflection Question: Does your product owner share enough business context that your team could independently suggest features or improvements — or are they only able to execute what they’re told?

The Bad Product Owner: The Firewall Who Blocks All Business Context

“We were working without the product mindset, without the product vision.” — Iryna Stelmakh

Iryna shares the story of what she calls the Firewall Product Owner — a PO who constantly said “I need to go ask someone” for every decision, but never brought back answers. The result: backlog items lacked clarity, priorities changed frequently, and the team couldn’t understand the real product direction. They were working without a product mindset or vision. As Vasco frames it, this PO wasn’t just a proxy — they were a firewall, blocking the team from accessing any business context or market knowledge. The team couldn’t reach the market representatives because they didn’t even know who was on the other side.

Iryna’s approach to this kind of situation: escalate with suggestions, not just complaints. Turn problems into opportunities and extensions — propose bringing in a business analyst to support the PO, or suggest restructuring the communication between the business and technical sides. In her case, the client eventually recognized the problem and replaced the PO with someone who could actually bridge the gap. The new PO changed everything.

In this episode, we also refer to the concept of turning problems into opportunities.

Self-reflection Question: When your product owner is unable to provide timely answers, do you escalate with specific suggestions for improvement — or do you simply wait and hope things get better?

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About Iryna Stelmakh

IRYNA Stelmakh is a Project & Delivery Leader and Agile Coach who helps leaders turn complexity into clarity. With 10+ years across US, Nordic, and Eastern European environments, she works at the intersection of business transformation and human systems, building resilient organizations and high-performing teams in complex contexts.

You can link with Iryna Stelmakh on LinkedIn.

Iryna Stelmakh: The Almost Invisible Scrum Master, Why Team Independence Is the Ultimate Success Metric

“A successful Scrum Master is almost invisible — not because they don’t contribute, but because the team is no longer dependent on them for every decision.” — Iryna Stelmakh

Iryna offers a powerful definition of success for Scrum Masters: becoming almost invisible. Not because the Scrum Master isn’t contributing, but because the system works — with or without them. The team takes ownership of delivery, solves problems collaboratively, and continuously improves its own process. Each team member can propose, vote, and suggest changes because the environment has a high level of trust.

When that happens, Iryna explains, the Scrum Master becomes more of a system observer and catalyst rather than a daily driver. As Vasco adds, this perspective is valuable because it looks beyond personal metrics — it examines behaviors across all the interactions the Scrum Master facilitates: between the team and the product owner, between the team and stakeholders during reviews, and within the team itself. The Scrum Master role sits at the nexus of many interactions, and success means those interactions work well even when you step back.

Self-reflection Question: If you were absent for a full sprint, would your team maintain the same quality of collaboration, decision-making, and delivery — or would things fall apart without you?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Energy Retrospective

Iryna shares her favorite retrospective format — one she calls the Energy Retrospective. Instead of the standard “what went well / what didn’t” framing, it asks three questions: What gave us energy this sprint? What drained our energy? And what should we start, stop, or continue doing to keep our energy at the right level?

This approach shifts the conversation from purely technical task problems to real human dynamics. As Iryna explains, closing technical tasks and resolving issues is important, but so is the wellness of the team. The Energy Retrospective creates space for both. She also notes that retrospective format should match the team: for open, trusting teams, a straightforward format works fine. But for new teams or teams with high resistance — those still in the forming stage where the Scrum Master isn’t yet a trusted figure — she uses metaphorical approaches, like asking team members to pick pictures that represent their feelings about the sprint. Even a happy, sad, or frustrated monkey picture can surface insights that direct questions might not.

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

About Iryna Stelmakh

You can link with Iryna Stelmakh on LinkedIn.

Iryna Stelmakh: Fighting Agile Theater, When Organizations Adopt the Ceremonies But Not the Mindset

“Transparency can be uncomfortable, but without transparency, there is no real improvement.” — Iryna Stelmakh

Iryna brings a challenge she calls “Agile Theater” — organizations that implement all the visible parts of Agile (the ceremonies, the boards, the terminology) while the underlying mindset remains unchanged. Decisions stay centralized, transparency is avoided, and problems are hidden. As she puts it: “Teams go through the emotions of Agile without actually benefiting from it.”

But her real challenge goes deeper. Iryna shares a story about building trust with outsourcing clients. Five days into a new assignment on a project the company had worked on for over ten years, she received an email listing team members to be removed — with no explanation. It was a red flag: the absence of transparency signaled that the client relationship lacked the trust bridge needed for genuine collaboration.

Iryna’s response was characteristically direct. She organized a call with stakeholders and discovered the client operated on quarterly budget cycles — these cuts could happen every three months. Instead of accepting the loss, she shifted the cut team members to other projects within the same account, turning the problem into an opportunity. A QA engineer moved to another project that needed one. A developer and two others got upsold into a team extension. Nobody ended up on the bench.

Then came the systemic fix: Iryna set up one-on-one meetings with each stakeholder across different divisions to stay informed in advance. Prevention over reaction — because, as she says, reactions cost more.

Self-reflection Question: In your current engagement, do you have direct relationships with the people who make budget and staffing decisions — or would a surprise email catch you completely off guard?

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

About Iryna Stelmakh

You can link with Iryna Stelmakh on LinkedIn.

Iryna Stelmakh: When Communication Clarity Matters More Than Technical Complexity, A Healthcare Project That Fell Apart

“Communication clarity is more important than technical complexity, because if you do not understand, it’s pretty hard to execute.” — Iryna Stelmakh

Iryna shares one of her most painful career stories — a project in the healthcare domain focused on cancer treatment research data. When she joined, she was managing around 9 projects simultaneously and agreed to take this one on the condition that a strong technical lead would own the technical direction. The project began with a critical misunderstanding: sales had communicated that the client needed a database redesign, but the client actually needed a migration to a different database type. Similar words, fundamentally different work.

For three months, the team worked through research and discovery phases, trying to understand the actual problem. But communication gaps — compounded by language barriers between the Ukrainian development team and the US-based client — prevented them from identifying the real need in time. Iryna trusted the technical lead’s reports that everything was on track. She relied instead of checking. Eventually, the client lost confidence and left. It remains the only project in her career she considers a genuine failure.

The lesson cuts deep: teams must have people who can ask the right questions early. As Vasco observes, the root cause was implicit assumptions that were never discovered or explored by the different people involved.

In this episode, we also talk about the importance of the monitoring and controlling phase in project management.

Self-reflection Question: When you trust a team member’s assessment that “everything is fine,” what verification steps do you take to confirm that understanding is truly shared across all stakeholders?

Featured Book of the Week: Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

Iryna recommends Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais as a book that changed how she thinks about Agile leadership. “Great agile leadership is not only about frameworks, but it’s about communication, influence, and the ability to align people around shared goals,” she explains. The book helped her understand that Agile isn’t just about team process — it’s about organizational structure, team boundaries, and responsibilities. She also recommends Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss for Scrum Masters who want to sharpen their communication and influence tactics. As Iryna puts it, communication is one of the most important skills a Scrum Master must have.

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

About Iryna Stelmakh

You can link with Iryna Stelmakh on LinkedIn.

Iryna Stelmakh: When “Agile” Becomes a License to Change Everything, The Cost of No Rules in Backlog Management

“For me, it was pretty hard to explain that Agile is about cost reduction, and not about cost increasing.” — Iryna Stelmakh

Iryna shares a story from one of her first projects as a Scrum Master, working with a client from Israel who saw Scrum as an open invitation to add anything to the backlog at any time. For this client, agility meant unlimited flexibility — the freedom to extend not just the product backlog but the sprint backlog, multiple times per sprint. As Vasco points out, this is a pattern many teams recognize: when there’s no cost to disrupting a sprint, it becomes effortless to keep piling on work, destroying the very predictability that sprints are designed to create.

Iryna struggled to push back. It was one of her first projects, and the client was confident in his approach. But the experience taught her a lasting lesson: the collaboration with external clients must start with an agreement about how the team works. That means explaining the methodology during the pre-sale phase, documenting it in the contract, and teaching the client the benefits of the process before the work begins. As she puts it, when she checked back with the sales and engagement teams, she realized nobody had set those expectations. She relied instead of checking — and paid the price. Once she held sessions with the client to explain how Scrum works and what it delivers, things shifted. New tasks went into the product backlog and were prioritized properly through refinement, not dumped into active sprints.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you verified that your client or stakeholders truly understand how your team works — not just the label, but the actual rules and commitments?

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

About Iryna Stelmakh

You can link with Iryna Stelmakh on LinkedIn.