Junaid Shaikh Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Junaid Shaikh: Product Owner Anti-Patterns, From Team Owner to Product Owner, And The PO Who Got It Right

The Great Product Owner: Building Impactful Relationships That Get Things Done

The best PO Junaid has worked with had four qualities: clear, concise communication; an open mindset willing to be coached; courage to say “no” when needed; and the discipline to define the “what” and leave the “how” to the team. This PO started with five sources of truth — Excel tabs, whiteboards, JIRA, and other tools. When Junaid pointed out that five sources of truth is the opposite of transparency (one of Scrum’s three pillars), the PO asked for help. Junaid’s response: “I can’t do the push-ups for you.” Together, they consolidated everything into one tool. The team was happier, and the PO managed the backlog much better.

The key lesson: great product owners trust their team, communicate clearly, prioritize ruthlessly, and have the courage to say no. And they don’t try to own the team.

The Bad Product Owner: Unclear Decision Rights

Junaid opens with a line that cuts straight to the most common PO anti-pattern: “You are the product owner, not the team owner.” When he sees a PO slipping into command-and-control mode, he asks them one question: “What is your role?” They say “Product Owner.” He says: “Exactly. You own the product, not the team. If you were meant to own the team, we’d call you a project manager.”

The worst case he witnessed: a PO who was so possessive of “his” team that he required approval on everything — processes, tools, even holiday requests. In sprint planning, he would assign stories to individual team members (“Mr. X, you take this one”). He’d estimate the work himself, and when developers pushed back, he’d override them: “I was a developer, I know how long this takes.”

For approaching PO anti-patterns, Junaid has a deliberate style: he doesn’t confront upfront. He observes, takes notes, and starts by solving a smaller impediment to demonstrate he’s there to help. Once trust is built, he brings in coaching tools — first teaching the basics (“this is what the PO role is in Scrum”), then gradually coaching on specific anti-patterns observed in practice. He targets 10-15% improvement at a time. Six months later, you’ve already achieved 30-40% improvement.

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About Junaid Shaikh

Junaid Shaikh is an energetic Agile Coach with a natural flair for Agile and Scrum, shaped by recent experiences at software giants like Ericsson and hardware leaders ABB. In his work, he champions collaboration, curiosity, and continuous improvement. Beyond coaching, he brings the same passion to cricket, table tennis, carrom, and his newest sporting obsession — padel. You can link with Junaid Shaikh on LinkedIn.

Junaid Shaikh: How Scrum Masters Can Measure Their Own Impact, Practical Self-Assessment Metrics

On defining success as a Scrum Master, Junaid starts with a Peter Drucker quote: “You cannot improve something you cannot measure.” He proposes several practical self-assessment metrics:

First, the Agile Team Maturity Index — a spider graph that shows where the team stands across multiple criteria, making gaps visible and actionable.

Second, track retrospective action items. Create tiger teams for specific issues, run small iterative experiments, and measure in the next retrospective whether the trend is improving.

Third, watch for shared sprint goals. Junaid once saw a team with nine sprint goals for a two-week sprint — those weren’t goals, they were individual tasks. A real sprint goal should be something multiple team members work together to achieve.

Fourth, self-organizing teams. If the team falls apart when the Scrum Master is absent for a sprint, there’s a problem. Coach teams to self-organize, and their ability to function independently becomes a success metric.

Fifth, communication patterns. Too many emails flying around can signal hidden conflicts or trust barriers. If communication happens through the right channels — dailies, direct interactions — you’re likely in good shape.

Sixth, Scrum event health. If events get canceled too frequently, the team may be reverting to traditional ways of working.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: What Went Well, Not So Well, What Could Be Improved?

Junaid’s favorite retrospective format? The vanilla: what went well, what could have gone better, what to do better next. He’s tried many formats — the Three L’s (liked, learned, lacked), the Three Little Pigs, the sailboat retrospective — but the core principle is always the same. His practical advice: stick with a consistent format so the team gets better at the process itself rather than constantly adjusting to new concepts.

One addition he insists on for any format: an appreciation component. In the rush to analyze processes and outcomes, teams often skip acknowledging how another team member, PO, or Scrum Master helped during the sprint. That appreciation builds trust, respect, and openness that feeds into subsequent sprints.

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

About Junaid Shaikh

You can link with Junaid Shaikh on LinkedIn.

Junaid Shaikh: Managing Uncertainty As A Scrum Master, How Scrum’s Rhythm Creates Stability In Unstable Times

For this week’s coaching conversation, Junaid brings a challenge that resonates well beyond any single team: dealing with uncertainty. He references the World Uncertainty Index report from February 2026, which showed the highest levels of global uncertainty ever recorded — surpassing both the COVID pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis.

This uncertainty doesn’t stay at the geopolitical level. It seeps into teams. People show up stressed, unsure about what the next month or three months will bring. As Scrum Masters, we need to be cognizant of where our team members are coming from.

Vasco adds an important layer: uncertainty operates at multiple levels within organizations. A colleague you depend on might be out sick for two weeks. A supplier might not deliver on time. Every dependency is a source of uncertainty. The question becomes: what in our processes is designed to accept and adapt to that uncertainty?

Junaid’s answer is powerful in its simplicity: Scrum’s rhythm. The sprint, the planning, the daily, the retrospective — these events at a defined cadence create internal predictability. “When you have a rhythm, when you have a known sequence of events in front of you, that takes away a lot of uncertainty.”

Vasco builds on this: Scrum creates a boundary — the sprint — that accepts uncertainty outside while reducing it inside. Internal versus external predictability. Inside the sprint, the team can fail in small ways without exposing every failure to the outside. Compare that with traditional project planning, where every task on the critical path has external visibility and impact.

For practical tools, Junaid shares how he used the Eisenhower matrix with a team to convert uncertainty into actionable priorities. They listed all activities from recent sprints, plotted them on the matrix, and found they could delegate or deprioritize 20-25% of their work. That freed them to focus with certainty on the remaining 75%. Combined with timeboxing as an uncertainty management mechanism, teams can create pockets of predictability even in turbulent times.

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

About Junaid Shaikh

You can link with Junaid Shaikh on LinkedIn.

Junaid Shaikh: Why Teams Go Through The Motions of Agile Without Being Agile, And What To Do About It

On the topic of teams that self-destruct, Junaid paints a picture that many listeners will recognize. He picked up a team’s retrospective history and cumulative flow diagrams and found problems at every level: managers who declared “from tomorrow we’re going agile” without understanding what that meant, then started comparing velocity across teams. Product owners who took PO training but reverted to command-and-control project management. A previous Scrum Master doing what Junaid calls “zombie Scrum” — implementing the framework mechanically without understanding its purpose.

The pattern underneath it all: people enveloping their traditional mindset under an agile umbrella. The ceremonies happen, the daily standups run, but nobody is questioning why they’re doing any of it. As Vasco observes, this zombie pattern isn’t limited to Scrum — it happens with code reviews, architecture reviews, any process that gets adopted without critical thinking about its purpose.

Junaid’s insight: if you don’t understand the basics with the right mindset, every event feels like overhead. Teams complain about “too many meetings” because they’re running agile ceremonies on top of their old informal processes. “If you don’t get out of your previous shell, you cannot get into a new shell.”

Featured Book of the Week: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer.

Junaid’s book recommendation is The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. As a Scrum Master working at companies like Ericsson and ABB — organizations that are a “United Nations” of cultures — understanding cultural tendencies has been essential. But Junaid goes further: you can customize the Culture Map framework even within a team of people from the same country, using the parameters to map different personalities. It’s about how you use the tool, not just where people come from.

He also recommends Scrum Mastery: From Good to Great Servant Leadership by Geoff Watts for practical advice on the servant leadership role, and regularly visits Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org for real-world insights from the community.

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

About Junaid Shaikh

You can link with Junaid Shaikh on LinkedIn.

Junaid Shaikh: The Eager Scrum Master Trap, Why Proposing Solutions Too Early Can Backfire

In this episode, Junaid shares a story from his early days as a Scrum Master when enthusiasm got ahead of experience. Fresh from a CSM certification and full of ideas, he walked into teams and started proposing solutions — “No, this is not how you should do it.” It felt obvious. It wasn’t.

The wake-up call came when he proposed working agreements to a team that had been collaborating well for two years. The pushback was immediate: “Why do we need this?” He realized he was bringing a tool he’d seen elsewhere without first understanding whether the team actually had the problem that tool was meant to solve.

This led to a key shift in his approach: stop assuming. Instead of going in with answers, Junaid started creating small tiger teams with the affected people, facilitating sessions where they owned the solution. The result? Much higher acceptance and genuine continuous improvement.

These days, Junaid tests his ideas before bringing them to the full team. He connects with individual team members first — his “closer allies” — to validate whether his analysis matches reality. Only when a few people confirm “yes, this is a real problem” does he bring the proposal to the group.

As Vasco puts it: not all tools are appropriate at all times for all people. The same working agreements that were wrong for one team at one moment might be exactly right for a different team, or the same team at a different moment.

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

About Junaid Shaikh

You can link with Junaid Shaikh on LinkedIn.