Mukhtar Kadiri Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Mukhtar Kadiri: The Three Qualities That Separate Great Product Owners From Those Who Just Drop Tickets

The Great Product Owner: Decisive, Versatile, and Credible at Every Level

“This person could hold his own at any level of the organization — with executives, with engineering leadership, and with the team.” – Mukhtar Kadiri

Mukhtar describes the best product owner he ever worked with through three distinct qualities. First, this person could operate at any level — equally comfortable in a strategic conversation with executives and in a tactical session with the engineering team.

Second, they had vast cross-functional knowledge. They weren’t a specialist in any one domain, but they could hold intelligent, credible conversations with marketing, go-to-market, customer success, and engineering alike. And third — perhaps most critically — they were decisive.

In ambiguous environments where nobody has done this before, teams need someone who will pick a direction and say “let’s find out,” even if the decision might be wrong. That decisiveness, combined with the ability to course-correct early, is what separates great product owners from those who leave teams waiting for direction that never comes.

Self-reflection Question: Which of these three qualities — operating at any level, cross-functional credibility, or decisiveness — is strongest in your product owner, and which one needs the most development?

The Bad Product Owner: Not Owning the Backlog

“If you don’t have a strong product person, engineering just takes over the backlog. And that is dangerous, because it’s product that is the representative of the customers.” – Mukhtar Kadiri

Mukhtar has seen it happen repeatedly: when a product owner doesn’t truly own the backlog, a strong engineering lead steps in and takes over prioritization by default.

Things still get built — often beautiful, technically elegant solutions — but they don’t produce business value because engineering lacks the customer intimacy that product should bring. The fix isn’t simple, but Mukhtar identifies three levers.

First, mentorship — pairing a junior product person with a more senior one to build confidence and skills. Second, building technical literacy — a product owner who can’t meet engineering halfway will always be seen as an outsider dropping tickets. And third, closing the relationship gap between product and engineering.

As Mukhtar points out, a product owner is technically a part of the team, but if the team doesn’t feel like they’re a part of the team, that gap becomes a chasm. There needs to be real overlap between engineering and product — not just shared meetings, but shared understanding.

Self-reflection Question: Is your product owner truly a member of the team — or are they just someone who shows up to drop tickets and disappear until the next sprint planning?

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

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Mukhtar Kadiri

Mukhtar Kadiri is a PM career coach with 15+ years in project management. He specializes in helping project and program managers land $100–300K roles. He’s been named the #1 PM in Canada. He also has a LinkedIn following of 67K+ professionals. He shares practical insights for FREE on LinkedIn, where he talks about job search, career growth, and thriving as a PM.

You can link with Mukhtar Kadiri on LinkedIn.

Mukhtar Kadiri: Why Success Means Nothing If the Project Doesn’t Move the Business Forward — And How Public Commitments Keep You Honest

“If you’re not careful with success, you can deliver a project, but the project will really not do much for the business.” – Mukhtar Kadiri

For Mukhtar, success is personal — he’s the kind of project leader who gets emotionally invested, who thinks about the project after hours, who needs recovery time between engagements. And that emotional investment shapes how he defines success: not as hitting deadlines or completing tasks, but as delivering real business value.

He breaks success metrics into three buckets using his signature rule of three: business and product metrics (NPS, revenue, market penetration), project management metrics (velocity, burn-down, risk scores), and software and system metrics (availability, transactions per second, platform health).

But the real insight is in how he holds himself accountable. Mukhtar makes public commitments at the start of every project — “Expect status updates from me every week” — because he knows that the discipline of narrating the project’s story every week forces him to truly understand what’s happening.

A status report isn’t bureaucratic busywork when you approach it as storytelling: you have to make sense of the data, surface what’s relevant, and articulate where the project actually stands. If you can’t tell the story, something’s missing from your understanding. That weekly narrative becomes both an accountability mechanism and an early warning system.

Self-reflection Question: Can you tell the story of your project right now — not just the tasks completed, but the narrative of where it stands, why, and what that means for the business?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: What Worked / What Didn’t Work / Next Steps

Mukhtar is a firm believer in simplicity, and his favorite retrospective format reflects that — the classic “What worked, what didn’t work, and next steps.” He applies his rule of three here as well: three categories are easy for humans to hold in their heads, removing cognitive overhead so the team can focus on the conversation itself. But Mukhtar is quick to point out that a simple structure can still produce terrible retrospectives.

What matters more is the facilitation: making sure people feel safe at the very start, level-setting so participants can “land” into the retrospective after jumping from another meeting, giving everyone a moment of quiet introspection to write things down before discussion begins — ensuring both quiet and loud voices are heard.

He prepares for every retrospective because, as he puts it, “if you run a bad retro, you could do damage to your team morale and your project.” Active facilitation — watching for who isn’t speaking, encouraging quieter voices, managing tone — is what transforms a simple format into a powerful conversation.

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

About Mukhtar Kadiri

You can link with Mukhtar Kadiri on LinkedIn.

Mukhtar Kadiri: Merging Three Companies Into One Platform — When Founders Can’t Let Go and Leaders Won’t Decide

“A lot of times, conflict arises because people don’t understand each other. The first thing you need to do is make sure they understand each other.” – Mukhtar Kadiri

Mukhtar brings us a challenge from a merger and acquisition program where a dominant software company acquired two competitors simultaneously — both solving the same market gap, each with their own platform, their own founders still in place, and their own fierce loyalties.

The mission: merge three platforms into one. But the technical challenge was the easy part. The real complexity was human — founders who’d built their companies from scratch watching their babies potentially get retired, teams losing people to low morale and uncertainty, and leadership paralyzed by the knowledge that every decision would make somebody unhappy.

Together, Mukhtar and Vasco explore a four-step approach to navigating these high-stakes disagreements:

1. First, create a feeling of time abundance — never rush a decision that requires buy-in.
2. Second, get each side to present their perspective with only clarifying questions, no judgment.
3. Third, name the disagreement explicitly — turn emotions into concrete, debatable statements.
4. And fourth, co-create an alternative solution that doesn’t come from either original position, because co-creation builds commitment.

Mukhtar adds a critical fifth element: steel-manning — having each side articulate the other’s argument as if defending it. When people feel genuinely understood, even “disagree and commit” becomes possible.

In this episode, we refer to steel-manning and the concept of disagree and commit.

Self-reflection Question: When you’re facilitating a disagreement between two strong positions, do you rush toward a decision — or do you invest the time to make sure both sides can articulate each other’s argument before you even think about next steps?

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

About Mukhtar Kadiri

You can link with Mukhtar Kadiri on LinkedIn.

Mukhtar Kadiri: When the Smartest Person on the Team Becomes the Biggest Bottleneck — And Explodes in a Meeting

“A lot of times, the problem is not necessarily technical. It’s a human problem. Just figuring out the human dynamics removes the obstacles and makes the project flow.” – Mukhtar Kadiri

Mukhtar was brought into a healthcare software project where the team couldn’t hit any of their milestones. The product manager, engineering team, and head of engineering were supposed to be self-sustaining, but chaos reigned. What Mukhtar found through his one-on-ones was a pattern of finger-pointing — product blaming engineering, engineering blaming product.

Then, in one meeting, the head of engineering exploded. He burst out yelling in front of the entire team. In a private conversation afterward, Mukhtar discovered the root cause: this brilliant architect was a bottleneck. Everyone depended on him, he was stretched across multiple projects, and the frustration had been building with no outlet.

Mukhtar’s approach was direct — “Your name is on this project. Yelling is not going to help.” But the real insight came from what happened next. Once the head of engineering started controlling his outbursts, team morale improved almost immediately.

Combined with basic structure — regular meetings, low-hanging-fruit milestones — the team built momentum and eventually became self-sufficient. The lesson? No matter how technical the challenge looks, it’s always a people problem. And one-on-ones aren’t just status updates — they’re pressure valves that prevent public explosions that can cause irreparable damage to team morale.

Self-reflection Question: Is there someone on your team who’s carrying too much load in silence — and what would it take for you to create a safe space where they can express that frustration before it boils over?

Featured Book of the Week: HBR Project Management Handbook by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

Mukhtar recommends the HBR Project Management Handbook because, as he puts it, “A lot of project management books, I can read them and it’s almost like I’m not really learning anything new. But this one had substance.” After stumbling into project management and leading projects for seven years before even pursuing his PMP, Mukhtar found that most PM books simply codified what he already knew from experience.

The HBR handbook was different — it offered breadth, depth, and fresh approaches to common project management challenges. He also recommends the Rita Mulcahy PMP Exam Prep for those preparing for PMP certification, noting that studying for the exam crystallized frameworks around things he had been doing instinctively.

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

About Mukhtar Kadiri

You can link with Mukhtar Kadiri on LinkedIn.

Mukhtar Kadiri: The Invisible Stakeholder Who Almost Derailed His First Big Project

“Nobody really told me, okay, this is what success looks like. And that’s a very dangerous thing, because you can just go in there and be busy and be executing.” – Mukhtar Kadiri

Early in his career, Mukhtar was sitting on the bench with nothing to do — and his days felt numbered. When a low-priority project came along, he jumped at it, eager to prove himself. He met the contract holder, understood the terrain, laid out a plan, and started executing. Then a stakeholder he hadn’t even mapped called him into her office and blasted him.

The project wasn’t aligned with her vision — and it turned out she was more powerful than the contract holder, even though she appeared nowhere on the org chart. That moment forced Mukhtar to rethink everything. He started scheduling one-on-ones with every stakeholder he could find, asking each one what success looked like from their perspective, and then asking them to point him to the next person he should talk to.

What emerged was a comprehensive success criteria that no single person had articulated before — because even the leaders hadn’t sat down to define it. Mukhtar learned that in complex, ambiguous environments, success isn’t handed to you. It’s your job to surface it, articulate it, and get everyone aligned. As he puts it, don’t be fooled by org charts — the real stakeholder map is one you have to build yourself through one-on-one conversations.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you validated your stakeholder map beyond the org chart — and could there be an invisible stakeholder whose definition of success you haven’t yet discovered?

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

About Mukhtar Kadiri

You can link with Mukhtar Kadiri on LinkedIn.