Olaitan Fashanu Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Olaitan Fashanu: The Product Owner Who Doesn’t Care vs the PO Who Always Has the Answer

In this episode, we refer to a recurring theme in past podcast episodes—the proxy product owner who can’t make decisions because they’re not theirs to make.

The Great Product Owner: Always Available, Always Decisive, Always Has the Context

“There was nothing you tell, any questions you have about a particular feature that this guy doesn’t have an answer to. And that really moved the team so fast.” – Olaitan Fashanu

The best PO Olaitan ever worked with was the mirror opposite of every anti-pattern he’d seen. Deeply involved in refinement. Took backlog management seriously. Always brought the context.

Always available to the team. And—maybe most importantly—always ready to make a decision when devs surfaced trade-offs. The team could ask any question about any feature, and the answer was right there.

Not “let me check,” not “I’ll get back to you,” not “what do you think?”—a decision. That single quality, Olaitan says, was what moved the team faster than anything else. As a Scrum Master, when you see a great PO at work, you also see the amplifying waves of impact: motivation rises, quality rises, ownership grows. Olaitan’s takeaway is sharp: the success of our job depends on how well the product owner does theirs.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time your PO made a real-time decision that unblocked the team in a single conversation—and what’s preventing that from being the norm?

The Bad Product Owner: Doesn’t Care About Impact, Can’t Make Decisions

“The product owner cares about delivery. We just need to release to the customer. That is something I don’t like.” – Olaitan Fashanu

Olaitan describes two anti-patterns wrapped into one bad-PO type. The first: the PO who doesn’t care about the impact of their work on the team. Tickets dropped without context. No refinement. No problem framing. Just “ship by end of month.” The data shows up in Jira if you’re paying attention—patterns of churn, quality issues, customer complaints, slow market response.

Beyond the numbers, the team loses motivation, frustration creeps in, and eventually you lose the team entirely. The second anti-pattern, layered on top: the PO who can’t make decisions. Developers come back with two options and the trade-offs—and the PO can’t pick one.

Vasco connects it to the proxy PO pattern explored in past episodes—a PO whose decisions aren’t actually theirs to make. The cost is the same either way: the team stalls, ownership erodes, and stakeholder conflict grows.

In this segment, we refer to the proxy PO anti-pattern explored in earlier episodes of the podcast.

Self-reflection Question: Is your PO unable to decide—or unable to be allowed to decide? The difference changes which conversation you need to have, and with whom.

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About Olaitan Fashanu

Olaitan Fashanu is a customer-focused professional with expertise in product management, technology, and coaching. He drives digital and agile transformation, builds collaborative cross-functional teams, and delivers high-quality products across markets. Curious and strategic, he explores AI and data intelligence while balancing technical depth, business goals, culture, structure, and long-term vision.

You can link with Olaitan Fashanu on LinkedIn.

Olaitan Fashanu: I Love Data—Why Success for a Scrum Master Means Doing the Hard Measurement Work

“You don’t get better by not trying to be better.” – Vasco Duarte (channeling Olaitan’s own discipline)

For Olaitan, success as a Scrum Master comes down to two things—team effectiveness and team health—and he refuses to guess at either. Twice a year, in what he calls his winter and summer cycles, he runs a structured team health check survey to capture how confident people feel, whether they hold each other accountable, and whether psychological safety is real or theatrical.

Between those checkpoints, he runs constant one-on-ones—and not just with developers. QAs, designers, the PO. Everyone gets the conversation. He pulls outside-in feedback from customers and partner teams too, because effectiveness measured only from the inside is fiction.

“I love data. Maybe it’s my background in mathematics. I love looking at patterns, comparing things.” The work is real, the load is real—but for Olaitan, refusing to do it is the same as refusing to grow.

Self-reflection Question: If you had to prove to yourself today that your team is genuinely effective and healthy, what data would you actually have—and what would you only be guessing at?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start / Stop / Continue (and a twist Vasco offers Olaitan)

Olaitan’s go-to is the simple Start / Stop / Continue format—the easiest way he’s found to get even quiet developers to engage, especially at the start of a new iteration. Vasco offers him a twist mid-episode: what if you only used one of the three? When the team is overwhelmed, run a Stop-only retro. When a release just shipped and energy is high, run a Start-only retro.

Breaking the format pattern creates a small spark of “wait, why is this different today?”—which is often exactly the energy a tired team needs. Olaitan also shares a second favorite: the Friction vs. Drivers (or Fuel) format—mapping what’s slowing the team down on one side and what’s actively energizing them on the other. The two sides of the same coin, made visible.

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

About Olaitan Fashanu

You can link with Olaitan Fashanu on LinkedIn.

Olaitan Fashanu: Three Teams, Three Backlogs, One Feature—Can You Make Them See Each Other?

“How do we ensure that these teams actually work together to show the same data?” – Olaitan Fashanu

Olaitan brings a problem most Scrum Masters in scaled environments will recognize. Three teams. Three separate backlogs. One product, accessed across app, web, and support channels.

Leadership made a top-down team topologies decision: split the work to move faster. Predictable result—each team optimizes for their own backlog, blind to what the others are building, sometimes shipping the same feature twice with different behaviors. The product owners know there’s overlap. The teams love the idea of linking tickets across backlogs.

They just won’t maintain the habit. Olaitan and Vasco walk through experiments together: a sync between POs, joint refinement sessions, linking tickets, putting “this is also being built by Team B” notes at the top of stories. The deeper insight: the Scrum Master’s job is to keep surfacing information until a habit forms. As Vasco’s old lifting coach put it—you find the imbalance, you get rid of the imbalance, one by one. That’s how you get stronger.

In this episode, we refer to team topologies and the practice of surfacing information across team boundaries.

Self-reflection Question: Where in your organization are teams unknowingly building the same thing twice—and what’s the smallest experiment you could run this week to make that visible?

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

About Olaitan Fashanu

You can link with Olaitan Fashanu on LinkedIn.

Olaitan Fashanu: When the New PO Stops Refining—and the Team Starts Self-Destructing

“If we’re actually doing the job of refining this ticket properly, then we will not be creating this tension in the team.” – Olaitan Fashanu

The team was working well. They had a strong PO who came to refinement with the problem clearly framed: this is what we want to solve, here’s the context, here’s the user story, here are the acceptance criteria. The team picked it up, refined it, ran with it. Then change came.

A new PO joined—and the routine collapsed. The new PO cared about one thing: hitting the delivery date. Tickets dropped into Jira with no context, no problem statement, no acceptance criteria. Just “this needs to ship by end of month.” Within weeks, Olaitan saw the symptoms cascade through the team. Developers asked designers what tickets even meant.

QA struggled to maintain quality. Tension built. The diagnosis was clear: refinement had broken. His fix? Bring back the Definition of Ready as a non-negotiable shared standard, and introduce a product trio—business viability, technical feasibility, and design usability collaborating on every story before it reaches the rest of the team.

In this segment, we talk about the Definition of Ready and the product trio collaboration model.

Self-reflection Question: What’s the symptom you’re seeing in your team right now—and could the real source be how stories are getting refined, not how they’re getting built?

Featured Book of the Week: The Secrets of Facilitation by Michael Wilkinson

Olaitan calls out The Secrets of Facilitation by Michael Wilkinson as the book that shaped how he handles difficult moments. The book teaches the power of asking the right question at the right time—clarifying questions, probing questions, the questions that drive a stuck group forward.

“You will understand how, when to ask clarifying questions, ask really powerful questions that will help you drive or probably help you reach your goal in any session you find yourself.” For Olaitan, the biggest payoff was learning to manage group dynamics in real time—what to do when something said in a meeting lands badly, when a comment threatens to derail the room.

As a Scrum Master, you live in those moments. This book hands you a toolkit for them.

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

About Olaitan Fashanu

You can link with Olaitan Fashanu on LinkedIn.

Olaitan Fashanu: The Scrum Master Who Tried to Force His Way In—and Got Schooled

“When you want to make things work, you need to find a way to carry people along. Lead, not by forcing your way on the team, because you’re working with smart people, you’re working with professionals.” – Olaitan Fashanu

When Olaitan transitioned from project management into the Scrum Master role, he carried his old habits with him: enforce, push, drive. Then he walked into a team of senior developers. In one retrospective, a team member casually suggested that someone could help set up Jira properly. Olaitan took it personally—wasn’t that his job?

The next day in the daily standup, he called it out publicly. The reaction told him everything. The team member shut down. The PO pulled him aside afterward to say, “We could have had a better discussion around this.”

That moment, Olaitan realized that having no formal authority isn’t a weakness to compensate for with force—it’s the whole point. The job is to influence, to nudge, to coach—even when the conversations are hard. Especially when they are hard.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you raised a difficult topic in a way that closed the conversation instead of opening it—and what would it have cost you to bring it up differently?

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

About Olaitan Fashanu

You can link with Olaitan Fashanu on LinkedIn.