po perspective Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

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.

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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: 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.

Mirela Mus: The Super Scrum Master, Blending Product Expertise and Coaching Skills

The Great Product Owner: The Super Scrum Master, Blending Product Expertise and Coaching Skills

In this episode, the focus was on a Scrum Master who went above and beyond the traditional role. This Scrum Master had extensive experience with the product side and demonstrated a highly personable nature with a coaching attitude. The phrase “it’s humans all the way down” encapsulated their approach, emphasizing the importance of understanding and dealing with people from a human perspective. The episode highlighted the multifaceted skills and perspectives that this Scrum Master brought to the role, emphasizing the value of combining product knowledge, interpersonal skills, and a coaching mindset to create a positive and effective team dynamic.

The Bad Product Owner: Unveiling a Scrum Master Anti-pattern, and what PO’s can do about it

In this episode, Mirela discussed a Scrum Master anti-pattern where certain individuals disrupted the entire team under cover of implementing Scrum. Mirela suggests that one way to avoid this anti-pattern is to have a mentor to support the Product Owner. In the mentoring sessions, Mirela questioned the PO about whether the work of the Scrum Master was causing disruption and noise, and whether they were escalating numerous issues. She advised self-reflection to identify any triggers for such behavior. Building positive relationships within the team was recommended. Mirela emphasizes that excessive escalation is detrimental to everyone involved.

The Ultimate Guide to Supporting Product Owners as a Scrum Master

Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.

About Mirela Mus

Mirela is the founder of Product People, a Product Management Consultancy on a mission to help companies discover and deliver great products faster. They have 41 full-time Product Managers who help companies focus on product-led growth and/or profitability.

You can link with Mirela Mus on LinkedIn and connect with Mirela Mus on Twitter.