Lai-Ling Su Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

The Explicit and Implicit Layers of Unclear Decision Rights | Lai-Ling Su

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

“What made her great was the fact that she focused not just on her technical prowess, but on the people, politics, and the performance side of product. And she used that to turn ambition into reality, and she used that to move strategy to execution.” – Lai-Ling Su

Lai-Ling describes a phenomenal product owner she worked with about 12 months ago. This woman wasn’t just technically strong—she was a leader whose team of 10 loved her because she mentored them to be as strong or stronger than herself.

The business loved her because she was exceptionally commercial, thinking about customer value, revenues, expenses, profit models, and marketing long before anything was built. She held everyone true to doing the right thing even when pressure mounted. The executive team loved her because her greatest strength was building solid, impactful relationships that transcended boundaries.

She removed the us-versus-them mentality, broke down departmental silos, handled politically charged scenarios, negotiated with difficult personalities across technology, legal, compliance, sales, and operations. She removed impediments responsively and got stuff done when others couldn’t. Her secret was focusing on people, politics, and performance—not just technical prowess.

In this episode, we refer to Esco Kilpi’s work on interactive value creation, which describes how value in knowledge organizations is created through ongoing conversations—not just meetings, but emails, wiki pages, and corridor conversations that steward decisions over time.

Self-reflection Question: How deliberately are you investing in building relationships that transcend your immediate team and department?

The Bad Product Owner: Unclear Decision Rights

“Does your head of product know that he has the rights and the authority to make the types of decisions that you want him to?” – Lai-Ling Su

The anti-pattern Lai-Ling encounters most persistently is unclear decision rights. She illustrates this with a story about a GM in a multinational who effectively worked as a chief product officer. His biggest complaint was that his head of product kept coming to him for decisions that should have been made independently—even though he’d been given $10 million a year to run his teams.

When Lai-Ling asked one simple question—”Does your head of product know he has the authority to make these decisions?”—the GM sat in shocked silence for a full minute. But the pattern runs deeper: there’s the assumption that people know their decision rights, there’s knowing your rights but not knowing how to make those decisions, and there’s knowing your rights but getting trumped every time you try, leading to learned helplessness.

Some product owners have never learned to make decisions because they always defer to someone who seems better at it. There are both explicit and implicit unclear decision rights—you might tell someone they have authority while implicitly sabotaging their decisions.

Self-reflection Question: Have you explicitly confirmed with your stakeholders what decisions you have the authority to make—and are those decisions being respected in practice?

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About Lai-Ling Su

Lai-Ling fixes the gap between operating model design and real-world delivery through her interim executive, consulting, capability building, and executive coaching work. She also equips product and transformation leaders with the capability everyone expects but no one teaches – how to navigate the people, politics, and performance expectations that come with their jobs.

You can link with Lai-Ling Su on LinkedIn.

What Scrum Masters Must Do More of in 2026—Think Like a Business Owner | Lai-Ling Su

“Success is so contextual. And I think the definitions and measurements of success also change over time. So, only you can definitively say what success is at any given time and how to appropriately measure it for your situation.” – Lai-Ling Su

Lai-Ling frames success for Scrum Masters around what she’d love to see more of in 2026: smart, strategic, and commercial decision-making. She observes a distinct gap in the business landscape—too few people are making decisions that balance customer value, revenues, expenses, and long-term sustainability.

This could mean reducing SKUs to enhance operational flow and reduce burnout, investing in change management from day one of a transformation, or cutting unused software licenses to save a colleague’s job or fund product innovation. To help Scrum Masters develop this capability, Lai-Ling puts them in the shoes of a business owner—whether through simulations, shadowing business leaders, or pairing with product owners to understand the business side of products beyond just the build side.

She emphasizes the difference between learning strategy through theory (like an MBA) versus learning it through actually operating a business, where consequences are real and immediate.

Self-reflection Question: When did you last consider how a decision in your domain impacts the broader commercial viability of your organization?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: LEGO Serious Play

Lai-Ling loves using LEGO for deeply reflective retrospectives, and she’s a certified LEGO Serious Play facilitator. The approach works beautifully for tender and courageous conversations because building with LEGO does several things simultaneously: it’s fun, the physical act of building helps process and articulate thoughts you didn’t have words for, and it depersonalizes what’s said because participants talk about a physical object rather than directly about people. You don’t need expensive certified kits—just grab basic bricks from a local shop, pose a reflective question, and let people build.

Lai-Ling notes that her best retrospectives have often been the most deeply uncomfortable ones for participants, because of how much personal and emotional truth emerges when you create that safe space for constructive dialogue. The kinetic and visual elements help crystallize ideas that would otherwise not come out so easily.

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

About Lai-Ling Su

You can link with Lai-Ling Su on LinkedIn.

When Leadership Changes—Supporting Teams Through the Uncertainty | Lai-Ling Su

“We have a once in a generational or once in a lifetime type of opportunity to fundamentally work with these leaders to shift the workplace environments and the workplace dynamics in the way that we’ve been trying to craft in the world of product and agile for the last few decades.” – Lai-Ling Su

Lai-Ling brings a systems-level challenge that has profound implications for Scrum Masters everywhere. Australia is on the brink of its largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history—$3.5 trillion over the next couple of decades—with 70% of private and family businesses planning to sell or succeed as part of this generational change.

This creates leadership vacuums as business leaders transition out and new ones step in. Some are family members stepping into roles without the full capability to lead; others are external CEOs facing resistance when they do things differently.

These transitions stall decisions, lose customer confidence, and fracture once tight-knit teams. Lai-Ling sees this as an unprecedented opportunity for Scrum Masters to support both outgoing and incoming leaders through succession planning, capability uplift, and protecting teams during the transition.

Teams need to be respected for what they’ve achieved, and Scrum Masters can serve as bridges—creating awareness about the team’s strengths and facilitating dialogue between old and new leadership to ensure continuity.

Self-reflection Question: How might you proactively prepare your team to navigate an upcoming leadership transition, whether it’s anticipated or unexpected?

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

About Lai-Ling Su

You can link with Lai-Ling Su on LinkedIn.

Why the Us-Versus-Them Mentality Is the Fastest Path to Team Self-Destruction | Lai-Ling Su

“The quickest way to self-destruction is to have an us-versus-them mentality. Because it permeates into every behavior, every action or inaction, and it impacts every single outcome as a result of it.” – Lai-Ling Su

Lai-Ling shares a compelling story about a leadership team in healthcare technology that was self-sabotaging their way into non-delivery—so much so that critical commercial outcomes were at serious risk. Yet the team themselves couldn’t see it; it was invisible to them. She identifies three layers of the us-versus-them dynamic that needed unpicking.

First, recent M&A activity had merged a larger corporate entity with a smaller, more nimble one, and people remained ferociously loyal to leaders from their old organizations.

Second, business goals were separate from technology goals, causing people to fall back to people-pleasing within their direct reporting lines rather than collaborating on shared purpose.

Third, the tension between growth ambitions and addressing legacy activities created another divide. What struck Lai-Ling most was how these “classic” patterns were invisible to those experiencing them—they just accepted it as part of doing business. The destruction wasn’t always stormy and visible; sometimes it was silent, with work piling up, nothing getting done, yet no one overtly upset.

In this segment, we talk about the importance of creating awareness and how Scrum Masters must be willing to point out these patterns, even at the risk of being seen as the odd ones out.

Self-reflection Question: What “classic” anti-patterns might be invisible in your organization right now because everyone has accepted them as just part of doing business?

Featured Book of the Week: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Lai-Ling approaches the book recommendation differently—she believes no single book has fundamentally influenced her, but books as a collective have made her who she is. She emphasizes reading far and wide across all topics and genres, looking for patterns in unexpected places. One standout is The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, which challenges the perception that checklists take away autonomy. Gawande writes about how checklists are a rapid-fire communication tool that can mean the difference between a seriously injured soldier dying on the battlefield or making it to a hospital with a good chance of survival. Lai-Ling also recommends When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, about a surgeon who became a cancer patient and had to navigate a massive identity shift—much like the identity shift we ask leaders to make during transformations.

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

About Lai-Ling Su

You can link with Lai-Ling Su on LinkedIn.

The Product and Service Story That Every Scrum Master Needs to Hear | Lai-Ling Su

“It was kind of at that moment that I realized, like, community was about providing people with the opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t have had. And whilst you could technically execute your product or service well, the customer experience is fundamentally a deeply emotional one.” – Lai-Ling Su

Lai-Ling shares a powerful story from when she was just 11 years old, running front of house at her family’s restaurant inside an Australian workers’ club. When a popular band was booked to play on a Saturday night, the venue reached max capacity—and almost everyone wanted food. With no ticketed order system and only her memory to match orders to customers, chaos ensued.

One father approached her, yelling about how long his food was taking. At the end of the night, Lai-Ling mustered the courage that only an 11-year-old possesses and asked him point-blank why he had reacted so strongly. His answer floored her: he only got to see his son every other weekend, and this evening was supposed to create a cherished memory together. Instead, they were hangry most of the night.

This moment taught Lai-Ling that customer experience is fundamentally emotional—it’s not about the food, but about what the interaction means to the people we serve. For the next decade, she continuously inspected every aspect of their restaurant operations, always seeking to improve how they served customers while remaining commercially viable.

In this episode, we refer to the “Scrum Masters are the future CEO’s, and a podcast by the Lean Enterprise Institute” blog post by Vasco.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you paused to understand the deeper meaning behind a stakeholder’s frustration, rather than just addressing the surface-level complaint?

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

About Lai-Ling Su

You can link with Lai-Ling Su on LinkedIn.