Njegos Ilic Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Njegos Ilic: The “Painting by Numbers” Scrum Master vs. The Quiet Leader Who Made the Team Self-Sufficient

In this episode, we refer to the concepts of Scrum Master as facilitator and team empowerment.

The Bad Scrum Master: The “Painting by Numbers” Approach That Leaves Product Owners Working Alone

“You basically feel totally alone because you are trying to deliver value as a team, but if nobody asks anything and nobody challenges anything, you end up defining everything yourself.” – Njegos Ilic

Njegos describes the worst Scrum Master anti-pattern he’s witnessed: the “painting by numbers” Scrum Master who runs every ceremony by the book — dailies, refinements, plannings, retros, reviews — but without understanding the purpose behind any of them. The meetings become a reporting cycle: “What did you do yesterday?” with no interaction, no challenging, no real engagement. From the product owner’s perspective, this is devastating. Njegos describes feeling completely alone — trying to deliver value as a team while nobody engages, nobody asks questions, nobody pushes back on assumptions. The downstream effect is predictable: gaps that could have been caught early with a single conversation only surface during development or after deployment. Worse, the lack of engagement creates doubt and overthinking — the product owner starts over-defining requirements because there’s no feedback loop, which reinforces the very passivity that caused the problem.

Self-reflection Question: Are the ceremonies on your team creating genuine engagement and learning — or have they become a reporting cycle that nobody actually needs?

The Great Scrum Master: The Quiet, Impactful Leader Who Made the Team Self-Sufficient

“The best Scrum Masters I worked with were invisible — they knew always when to speak, they sensed the pulse of the team, and they weren’t afraid to jump in when needed.” – Njegos Ilic

The best Scrum Masters Njegos has worked with share a common trait: they were almost invisible. They didn’t dominate meetings or insert themselves where they weren’t needed. But they were always present — sensing the team’s pulse, knowing when to step in, unafraid to say “we’re out of time, let’s take this offline.” They were knowledgeable about the product, which earned them genuine respect from developers. And perhaps most powerfully, they delegated facilitation itself. Njegos shares an example where a Scrum Master introduced a round-robin system: when new developers joined the team, everyone took turns facilitating meetings — planning, retros, dailies. This wasn’t just delegation for efficiency; it was empowerment by design. Team members who facilitated a retrospective suddenly understood how hard it is to lead one. That empathy changed how they participated when someone else was facilitating. The Scrum Master remained the guide, but the team grew its own capacity to self-organize.

Self-reflection Question: If your Scrum Master disappeared tomorrow, would your team know how to facilitate its own ceremonies — and if not, what does that say about how the role is being used?

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About Njegos Ilic

Njegos is a motivated and forward-thinking Product Manager and Agile Project Manager with experience in fast-paced SaaS environments. He empowers teams through leadership and guidance across product development. With a Lean mindset, he simplifies complexity, delivers in small, testable increments, and leverages rapid feedback loops to prioritize outcomes over output.

You can link with Njegos Ilic on LinkedIn.

Njegos Ilic: Why Measuring Your Product Bets Is the Key to Product Owner Success

“If you cannot measure what you build, you will just be depending on who is screaming the loudest and using your gut feeling — which is not a good thing long term.” – Njegos Ilic

This is a Product Owner week, where we interview Njegos Ilic, a product owner, and cover the same topics we usually cover, but from the PO perspective!

Njegos defines product owner success through three pillars: the ability to measure product bets, deep knowledge of the industry and product, and the humility to admit mistakes and be challenged. The measurement piece is central — without it, he argues, you’re flying blind, making decisions based on opinions rather than evidence, reacting to whoever screams loudest rather than what the data shows.

But Njegos is honest that not every environment makes measurement easy. Some companies lack the tooling, the culture, or the historical infrastructure to set up proper analytics. In those situations, he turns to user interviews as the next best thing — getting direct feedback from users, even though he acknowledges that opinions are still limited without data to fact-check them against. His most powerful suggestion: invite the whole team to user interviews, not just the product trio.

When developers hear directly from users, they connect to real-world problems, and conversations during refinements become richer and more grounded.

In this episode, we refer to The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick and Shift: From Product to People by Michael Dougherty and Pete Oliver-Kruger.

Self-reflection Question: How do you currently measure whether the features you shipped actually delivered the value you expected — and if you can’t measure it, what’s your fallback?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start With a Relaxing Exercise

Njegos doesn’t advocate for a specific retrospective template — and that’s the point. From his product owner perspective, he values retrospectives that begin with a relaxing, informal exercise to set the tone. Not everything needs to feel like business as usual.

This casual opening allows people to connect as humans first, which opens them up to think differently about what they learned during the sprint. Njegos is candid about the reality: some teams love icebreakers, while others find them childish and just want to get to the point. His advice is to sense the pulse of the team and adapt.

The format matters less than whether it creates an environment where people can be honest about what went well, what didn’t, and what to improve. A Scrum Master who reads the team’s vibe and adjusts accordingly — that’s what makes the difference.

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

About Njegos Ilic

You can link with Njegos Ilic on LinkedIn.

Njegos Ilic: How a Miro Board Experiment Changed the Way His Team Understood the Big Picture

“Every feature is a product bet. I would call this a process bet — just try to see what works best for you.” – Njegos Ilic

This is a Product Owner week, where we interview Njegos Ilic, a product owner, and cover the same topics we usually cover, but from the PO perspective!

Njegos shares a change story from his time working with a tech lead who had previously been a Scrum Master — a partnership that made all the difference. Together, they introduced a simple but powerful change: visualizing the team’s work on a Miro board instead of relying on a standard ticket board with cards and status columns.

They mapped out concepts, connected ticket numbers to a visual representation of how different pieces of work fit together, and used this board during dailies and refinements to track progress in context. The change wasn’t imposed top-down — Njegos and his tech lead simply said, “Give us one sprint to try this. If it doesn’t work, we drop it.” The result was immediate: dailies became more engaging, the team could see how their individual work connected to the bigger picture, and Njegos found it much easier to track progress as a visual thinker.

His advice for Scrum Masters and product owners who want to introduce something similar is refreshingly simple — frame it as a “process bet,” just like you’d frame a product bet. Try it, measure what happens, and if it doesn’t work, drop it and try something else. The willingness to experiment with your own process is a prerequisite for experimenting with the product itself.

Self-reflection Question: What “process bet” has your team been avoiding — and what would it take to just try it for one sprint?

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

About Njegos Ilic

You can link with Njegos Ilic on LinkedIn.

Njegos Ilic: Why the Product Trio Breaks the Hand-Off Mentality That Kills Team Engagement

“I can’t change people, but I can definitely involve them.” – Njegos Ilic

This is a Product Owner week, where we interview Njegos Ilic, a product owner, and cover the same topics we usually cover, but from the PO perspective!

Njegos describes a pattern he’s encountered multiple times as a product owner: teams where engagement is almost nonexistent. He walks into a refinement session, presents ideas, asks for feedback — and gets crickets. Nobody pushes back, nobody asks questions, nobody challenges the assumptions. The result is a product owner working in isolation, defining everything alone, only to discover gaps during development that could have been caught early with a single conversation.

Njegos is honest about the limits of what any one person can do — you can’t change people’s personalities, and expecting a Scrum Master to do so is unrealistic. But what you can do is involve people. His approach when joining a new team: don’t come in announcing how things will work. Instead, learn how the team already works, meet them where they are, and then find ways to fit new concepts into their existing rhythm. For the non-negotiable things — the red lines — he’s precise, open, and always provides an alternative rather than just pushing his way.

In this segment, we talk about Discovery and Delivery and the Product Trio concept.

Self-reflection Question: When you join a team meeting and get silence instead of feedback, do you assume agreement — or do you treat it as a signal that something deeper needs to change?

Featured Book of the Week: Inspired by Marty Cagan

Njegos recommends Inspired by Marty Cagan as the book that most shaped his approach to product ownership. He highlights the entire SVPG series — including Empowered and Transformed (available as the Product is Hard SVPG Box Set) — but points to the Product Trio concept as especially powerful.

As Njegos puts it, the Product Trio — bringing together a product manager, a tech lead, and a designer — removes the hand-off mentality where each discipline works in isolation. Instead of the product owner defining everything alone and handing it to the team, the trio shapes problems together during discovery, so that by the time work reaches the team, there’s shared understanding of why they’re building something, not just what to build.

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

About Njegos Ilic

You can link with Njegos Ilic on LinkedIn.

Njegos Ilic: Why Saying Yes to Every Stakeholder Request Is the Fastest Way to Fail as a Product Owner

“The game is rigged because they are strong personalities, they want to get things done, but you don’t have a magic stick — it’s really hard to deliver results if you cannot say no.” – Njegos Ilic

This is a Product Owner week, where we interview Njegos Ilic, a product owner, and cover the same topics we usually cover, but from the PO perspective!
Njegos shares a failure from early in his career as a product owner in startup environments, where he found himself saying yes to every stakeholder request. Working with strong-willed founders who expected things done their way, Njegos fell into the trap of trying to please everyone — building everything that was asked without pushing back.

The result was predictable: scattered priorities, no room to pivot, and a product backlog driven by the loudest voice in the room rather than real user needs. But Njegos frames this failure with a perspective that product owners at any stage can learn from. He compares the learning process to watching children learn to walk — stumbling and falling is not a sign of weakness, it’s a necessary step in the process of growing.

His advice to product owners currently stuck in this pattern: don’t try to avoid failures too hard, because you might prevent yourself from learning the most important lessons. Instead, treat failure as a feedback loop — something happened, you can measure it, and you can change your approach. The key is doing the actual work of reflection: What did I do? What should have been different? What wasn’t possible to change, and why?

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you said yes to a stakeholder request even though your gut told you it wasn’t the right call — and what would it take for you to say no next time?

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

About Njegos Ilic

You can link with Njegos Ilic on LinkedIn.