Peter Merel Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Peter Merel: From Desk-Pounding to Harmony — How the Game of Go Transformed a Violent Product Owner

In this episode, we refer to The Agile Way by Peter Merel and The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack.

The Great Product Owner: The Real Estate Visionary Who Built Channels of Learning

“When a product owner brings an attitude of learning together, it doesn’t just create psychological safety — it creates an active experimental mindset and a network of trust relationships that support each other in the learning process.” – Peter Merel

The best product owner Peter has worked with is Ben White, one of three brothers and partners in Ray White — Australia’s largest property management business, started by Ben’s great-grandfather. Ben had a vision for transforming how property management works across the entire Australian industry. To realize this vision, he tried to bring an app to market — and failed. Not once, but twice, before succeeding on the third attempt. What made Ben exceptional wasn’t his persistence alone, but that each failure became an opportunity to learn how to approach the problem differently.

The product he finally brought to market was informed by all of that learning. Ben’s real genius, Peter explains, is his ability to establish channels of learning — trust relationships that flow not just through the technical team, but throughout the entire business and back into product development. Without those trust relationships, psychological safety alone isn’t enough.

Peter also emphasizes that the product owner should be a servant leader, and points to Jack Stack’s open book management model where every employee is motivated to think and act as a business owner. When everyone understands that the future of the business is their future, they all collaborate as product owners — and the need for desk-pounding disappears entirely.

Self-reflection Question: How many channels of learning does your product owner currently have — and are there trust relationships in the organization that could become active channels but haven’t been tapped yet?

The Bad Product Owner: The Violent Visionary Who Didn’t Understand Collaboration

“The problem isn’t the role of product owner. The problem is the relationship between product owner and everybody else.” – Peter Merel

At Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Peter worked with a business executive who drove the development of a digital product that generated $2 billion in business for the bank. By any business measure, this person was extraordinarily successful. But as a product owner, he was terrible.

He pounded desks, went red in the face, insisted that everything the team was doing was wrong, didn’t trust anyone, and couldn’t be trusted either. The core anti-pattern wasn’t the shouting itself — it was that this person didn’t understand what a collaborative relationship needed to be. Peter found a creative solution: he taught the executive the game of Go. Go rewards harmony — you lose by being too passive, and you lose by being too aggressive.

Through Go, Peter taught the executive to create prompting questions, to work through others so they would carry concerns into meetings, and to provide answers rather than demands. Once the executive saw that collaboration was a more effective way to realize his own vision — faster, better, and more reliably — the behavior changed completely. The insight Peter shares is that before coaching behavior, you sometimes have to prove the business case for collaboration itself.

In this segment, we refer to The Agile Way by Peter Merel, which Peter now gives to product owners as a framework for understanding collaborative relationships.

Self-reflection Question: When you encounter a product owner who leads through demands rather than collaboration, have you considered showing them that collaboration is actually a faster path to getting what they want?

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 Peter Merel

Credited in the first agile book (XP Embraced), keynoted the first agile conference, invented the first agile training game, founded the xscale alliance, authored the agile way, Peter developed software by hand for forty years, coached agile in person for twenty years, and is working now to revolutionize the AI alignment landscape.

You can link with Peter Merel on LinkedIn. You can also find his work at agile.way.pm.

Peter Merel: Leadership as a Service — Why Scrum Masters Should Work Themselves Out of a Job and How Quality Circles Make Learning Flow

“A Scrum Master is a self-defeating role. If you have worked yourself out of a job, then you’ve succeeded.” – Peter Merel

Peter Merel challenges the very notion of the Scrum Master as a permanent organizational role. He argues that calling someone a “master” makes everyone else a servant — the opposite of what agile teams need. Instead, Peter advocates for leadership as a service, where every team member provides leadership to their team and every member of a swarm provides leadership to their swarm.

He points to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — the successful direct democratic republic that existed in North America before the USA, and which influenced the American founding fathers — as a model for distributed leadership. The protocol is simple enough to apply universally, regardless of organizational structure. Peter’s practical approach to success measurement is equally compelling: build a thin steel thread of alignment, prove it works in 8 to 12 weeks, then split it and backfill with the most progressive people in the organization.

He describes growing a group of 300 in just 9 months using this approach. The key insight is that coaches should not think of themselves as change agents, but rather as people who transform change participants into change leaders. Once a team can self-organize without you, your job is to move on to the next challenge — and that’s what success looks like.

In this episode, we refer to the concept of leadership as a service and the XScale Alliance.

Self-reflection Question: If you stepped away from your team tomorrow, could they self-organize effectively — and if not, what’s the one thing you could teach them this week that would bring them closer to not needing you?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Quality Circles

Peter Merel recommends quality circles as a cross-team retrospective format drawn from the Toyota Production System. The concept is simple but powerful: take three teams of six people and break them into six quality circles of three — one person from each team in each circle. These circles meet regularly for 10 to 30 minutes, ideally before team planning sessions, to share problems, ideas, and ways they can help each other.

The magic of three people is that while one person explains, another listens, and the third is already thinking about where the conversation goes next — creating what Peter calls “a beautiful hum.” Each circle brings two kinds of ideas back to their team: proposals for work that would benefit the teams as a whole, and treaties — working agreements between teams.

The teams remain autonomous and can decide how to respond. Peter emphasizes that this approach scales naturally — representatives from groups of teams can form quality circles at higher levels, keeping face-to-face communication alive across entire organizations. As Peter puts it, “Learnings flow across the organization — and that’s more valuable than anything you can come up with in a retrospective by yourself.”

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

About Peter Merel

You can link with Peter Merel on LinkedIn. You can also find his work at agile.way.pm.

Peter Merel: AI Alignment Is the Agile Coach’s Next Frontier — Using Throughput Accounting and Pull-Based Transformation to Prove Value

“Our jobs ARE about alignment. Alignment is how do we get all of the people and all of the tools to work together for mutual benefit.” – Peter Merel

Peter Merel brings a provocative perspective on the biggest challenge facing agile professionals today: AI and agile alignment. With AI rapidly advancing, Peter observes that everyone in the agile community is afraid for their jobs — but argues this fear is misplaced. The real challenge isn’t replacement; it’s alignment. How do we get biological and electronic entities to work together for mutual benefit? Peter’s answer begins with pull-based transformation — building a thin steel thread from business through to DevOps, proving it works with a small group, then growing it. He connects this to Goldratt’s throughput accounting, arguing that throughput (operating expense plus net profit) is the only metric immune to Goodhart’s Law.

From throughput, Peter derives three flows: value flow (throughput itself), workflow (the first derivative — what increases value flow), and learning flow (the second derivative — what improves workflow). He then introduces the pirate metrics (AARRR) — acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue — as market constraints that can be analyzed through Theory of Constraints. Peter’s frustration is that 25 years after Agile began, most business stakeholders still can’t identify their market bottleneck. Without that knowledge, he argues, priorities are meaningless. The path forward for agile coaches? Bring scientific rigor to transformation, measure what matters, and prove value before scaling.

In this episode, we refer to FAST Agile, Joe Justice’s work with Tesla and WikiSpeed, and the connection between throughput accounting and agile transformation metrics.

Self-reflection Question: Can you identify the single biggest market constraint limiting your organization’s throughput right now — and if not, how confident are you that your current priorities are the right ones?

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

About Peter Merel

You can link with Peter Merel on LinkedIn. You can also find his work at agile.way.pm.

Peter Merel: When a Hub-and-Spoke Executive Hijacks Your Agile Transformation — And What to Do About It

“Either you’re going to do what you know works, or you’re going to step away. Either way, you’re not going to do damage to your client.” – Peter Merel

After a successful transformation at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Peter Merel moved to Westpac, another major Australian bank, expecting to replicate the same approach. He found an executive who appeared eager to support an agile transformation — but this executive saw agile as the ideal form of micromanagement.

Everything and everyone revolved around this one individual, and as Peter began facilitating conversations that didn’t hub on the executive, the executive felt disempowered. Peter was blind to this dynamic — he had never encountered it before. The situation deteriorated because Peter had been hired to run a push-based transformation, when he knew from experience that only pull-based transformation works.

At Commonwealth Bank, he had built a thin steel thread from business through to DevOps with a small group, proved it worked, and then grown it organically. At Westpac, he let himself be persuaded to push change into the organization, and it compromised everything. The lesson Peter shares is stark: if you can’t do what you know works, and you can’t step away, then you are the problem. He also warns that when coaches fail this way, they make life harder for whoever comes next — a responsibility that’s easy to overlook in the moment.

In this segment, we talk about pull-based transformation and why push-based change programs consistently fail in large organizations.

Self-reflection Question: Are you currently in a situation where you’ve compromised on your approach to change — and if so, are you doing more damage by staying than you would by stepping away?

Featured Book of the Week: The Agile Way by Peter Merel

Peter’s own book, The Agile Way, is his modern translation of the Tao Te Ching — a 3,000-year-old text he argues was originally about how to achieve agile development in organizations large and small. Peter first started translating this text in 1989, and after decades of iteration, the book draws connections between ancient wisdom and modern agile practices — XP, Lean, Theory of Constraints, throughput accounting, and permaculture.

As Peter explains, “The sage in Lao Tzu is Shang Ren — agile people. This is a book about agile people, agility, and it always was.” The book is available at agile.way.pm, and Kent Beck, who wrote the foreword, calls it “a dangerous little book” — dangerous in the same sense as the word extreme.

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

About Peter Merel

You can link with Peter Merel on LinkedIn. You can also find his work at agile.way.pm.

Peter Merel: When Telling a Manager “You Don’t Have a Role” Backfires — A Lesson in Agile Coaching Humility

“A failure is not a failure. A failure is just the first step.” – Peter Merel

Peter Merel became a Scrum Master by stealth — long before the title existed. Credited in Kent Beck’s first XP book and present at the first agile conference, Peter was practicing lightweight processes at Hewlett Packard in the late 1990s. When he took a role at GMAC, the residential finance arm of General Motors, he brought XP practices with him and found early success. After six months of strong results, the project manager, Mike Alakom, sat Peter down and asked the most dangerous management question: “What do I do?” Peter gave what he now calls the stupidest answer possible — “You don’t really have a role in this process.”

The next day, Mike called an all-hands meeting and calmly maneuvered Peter into crediting the entire way of working as Mike’s idea. Peter stayed on for another six months, but at arm’s length. In hindsight, Peter recognizes Mike did exactly what he should have done. The second failure came at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where Peter was brought in to coach agile but was actually being set up to fail — a ripcord the organization could pull when it wasn’t ready for change.

The delivery manager, Des Webster, told Peter directly: “You were set up to fail.” Peter walked away, thinking he’d never return. But six years later, every person he had coached had moved up in the organization, and Peter came back as principal coach for 50,000 people. The CIO declared Agile one of the bank’s five pillars. Just because you hit the wall doesn’t mean it’s the end — it might be the beginning.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you failed at introducing change, and have you considered that the seeds you planted might still be growing in ways you can’t yet see?

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

About Peter Merel

You can link with Peter Merel on LinkedIn. You can also find his work at agile.way.pm.