stakeholder management Archives - Page 2 of 17 - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Christian Thordal: Structure Creates Freedom, How an Agile Coach Measures Success by Becoming Less Needed

“The less I shine and the more the team shines, the better I perform.” – Christian Thordal

Christian shares how his definition of success has fundamentally shifted over the years. Early in his career, the question was “How can I shine?” Today, it is the opposite — success means becoming invisible.

For Christian, a high-performing Scrum Master builds teams that no longer depend on them, much like raising a child to become a functional adult by eighteen. They can always call dad for coaching or to borrow money, but they can stand on their own. He illustrates this with a team he moved from what he calls “cowboy loose Kanban” to an adapted Scrum framework. The structure gave the team freedom: he can now miss dailies and planning sessions, and the team still produces a solid plan, sprint backlog, and sprint goal. He drops by to give pointers and encourage good behaviors.

Christian also highlights the importance of the Scrum Master and Product Owner partnership — “the mom and dad of the team” — and how building predictability and flow matters more than heroics. A key tactical insight: he created a one-pager roadmap for his domain leader showing issues, plans, milestones, and metrics.

This simple artifact gave leadership the comfort that things were under control, buying Christian the autonomy to do his best work. This proved critical when his team was decimated by departures in late 2025 — he hired new people, stabilized the group, and got them delivering again.

Self-reflection Question: What would it look like if your team could run a full sprint cycle without you present — and what is stopping that from happening today?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Four-Box Retrospective

Christian shares a retrospective format he calls the Four-Box Retrospective — a structured, pragmatic approach that resonates especially well with engineer-minded teams. The session begins with a team check-in to get the vibe in the room. Next, the team reviews last week’s agreements: who was accountable, and are those items still alive or handled?

Anything still alive moves forward automatically, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Then comes the core mechanic: topic creation divided into four boxes — Tech (tools and tech stacks), Team (issues within the team), Outside (external dependencies and blockers), and Parking Lot (everything else). Presenters explain their topics briefly to give context, and the group uses dot voting to surface the most pressing issues.

Discussion follows, with clear accountability assignments and action items written down. The pre-grouping into four boxes saves significant time by giving topics a natural home before discussion begins. Named owners for every action item create real progress between retrospectives. Christian values this format because it is grounded in actual operational problems — people can see the direct application of every conversation, which keeps engagement high and outcomes tangible.

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About Christian Thordal

Christian Thordal is a former Danish Army officer turned Agile Coach. He works with leaders and teams to create clarity, accountability, and momentum in complex organizations. His approach blends military leadership principles with modern product development, helping organizations move from discussion and strategy to real execution and measurable results.

You can link with Christian Thordal on LinkedIn.

Bhavin Shukla: When Protecting Your Agile Team Becomes the Barrier to Their Growth

“The perception I had was safe space means insulation from creating that transparency. It was not about protecting the teams. It was actually about giving them the voice, giving them the platform.” – Bhavin Shukla

Bhavin shares a story from early in his Scrum Master journey, working with two teams building a BI and regulatory platform in Australia. When he arrived, team morale was low — people buried in their screens, going for coffee alone, no healthy debates happening. His natural instinct kicked in: protect the team, help them gel, get the best out of them. But his coach asked a question that changed everything: “What’s the balance between protecting the team and creating visibility and transparency?”

Bhavin realized he’d been shielding the team from stakeholders, keeping ceremonies closed and conversations siloed. When the team opened up their reviews to stakeholders with clear expectations, something shifted. The backlog started changing based on real feedback, healthy tension built up, and the team started humming. The lesson was profound — creating a safe space doesn’t mean insulating the team from reality. Psychological safety isn’t the absence of difficult emotions; it’s the freedom to have them without destructive patterns. By isolating the team, Bhavin had actually been undermining their trust and growth.

Self-reflection Question: Are you protecting your team in ways that might actually be preventing them from building the stakeholder relationships and transparency they need to grow?

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

About Bhavin Shukla

Bhavin joins us from Australia. Bhavin is driven by unlocking potential and helping people thrive in ambiguity through clarity, honesty, and discipline. He believes growth comes from truthful conversations, thoughtful experimentation, and learning from failure. Guided by ownership, confidence, kindness, and purpose, he focuses on what matters most to build meaningful progress for himself and others.

You can link with Bhavin Shukla on LinkedIn.

Iryna Stelmakh: Fighting Agile Theater, When Organizations Adopt the Ceremonies But Not the Mindset

“Transparency can be uncomfortable, but without transparency, there is no real improvement.” — Iryna Stelmakh

Iryna brings a challenge she calls “Agile Theater” — organizations that implement all the visible parts of Agile (the ceremonies, the boards, the terminology) while the underlying mindset remains unchanged. Decisions stay centralized, transparency is avoided, and problems are hidden. As she puts it: “Teams go through the emotions of Agile without actually benefiting from it.”

But her real challenge goes deeper. Iryna shares a story about building trust with outsourcing clients. Five days into a new assignment on a project the company had worked on for over ten years, she received an email listing team members to be removed — with no explanation. It was a red flag: the absence of transparency signaled that the client relationship lacked the trust bridge needed for genuine collaboration.

Iryna’s response was characteristically direct. She organized a call with stakeholders and discovered the client operated on quarterly budget cycles — these cuts could happen every three months. Instead of accepting the loss, she shifted the cut team members to other projects within the same account, turning the problem into an opportunity. A QA engineer moved to another project that needed one. A developer and two others got upsold into a team extension. Nobody ended up on the bench.

Then came the systemic fix: Iryna set up one-on-one meetings with each stakeholder across different divisions to stay informed in advance. Prevention over reaction — because, as she says, reactions cost more.

Self-reflection Question: In your current engagement, do you have direct relationships with the people who make budget and staffing decisions — or would a surprise email catch you completely off guard?

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

About Iryna Stelmakh

IRYNA Stelmakh is a Project & Delivery Leader and Agile Coach who helps leaders turn complexity into clarity. With 10+ years across US, Nordic, and Eastern European environments, she works at the intersection of business transformation and human systems, building resilient organizations and high-performing teams in complex contexts.

You can link with Iryna Stelmakh on LinkedIn.

The Explicit and Implicit Layers of Unclear Decision Rights | Lai-Ling Su

The Great Product Owner: Building Impactful Relationships That Get Things Done

“What made her great was the fact that she focused not just on her technical prowess, but on the people, politics, and the performance side of product. And she used that to turn ambition into reality, and she used that to move strategy to execution.” – Lai-Ling Su

Lai-Ling describes a phenomenal product owner she worked with about 12 months ago. This woman wasn’t just technically strong—she was a leader whose team of 10 loved her because she mentored them to be as strong or stronger than herself.

The business loved her because she was exceptionally commercial, thinking about customer value, revenues, expenses, profit models, and marketing long before anything was built. She held everyone true to doing the right thing even when pressure mounted. The executive team loved her because her greatest strength was building solid, impactful relationships that transcended boundaries.

She removed the us-versus-them mentality, broke down departmental silos, handled politically charged scenarios, negotiated with difficult personalities across technology, legal, compliance, sales, and operations. She removed impediments responsively and got stuff done when others couldn’t. Her secret was focusing on people, politics, and performance—not just technical prowess.

In this episode, we refer to Esco Kilpi’s work on interactive value creation, which describes how value in knowledge organizations is created through ongoing conversations—not just meetings, but emails, wiki pages, and corridor conversations that steward decisions over time.

Self-reflection Question: How deliberately are you investing in building relationships that transcend your immediate team and department?

The Bad Product Owner: Unclear Decision Rights

“Does your head of product know that he has the rights and the authority to make the types of decisions that you want him to?” – Lai-Ling Su

The anti-pattern Lai-Ling encounters most persistently is unclear decision rights. She illustrates this with a story about a GM in a multinational who effectively worked as a chief product officer. His biggest complaint was that his head of product kept coming to him for decisions that should have been made independently—even though he’d been given $10 million a year to run his teams.

When Lai-Ling asked one simple question—”Does your head of product know he has the authority to make these decisions?”—the GM sat in shocked silence for a full minute. But the pattern runs deeper: there’s the assumption that people know their decision rights, there’s knowing your rights but not knowing how to make those decisions, and there’s knowing your rights but getting trumped every time you try, leading to learned helplessness.

Some product owners have never learned to make decisions because they always defer to someone who seems better at it. There are both explicit and implicit unclear decision rights—you might tell someone they have authority while implicitly sabotaging their decisions.

Self-reflection Question: Have you explicitly confirmed with your stakeholders what decisions you have the authority to make—and are those decisions being respected in practice?

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

About Lai-Ling Su

Lai-Ling fixes the gap between operating model design and real-world delivery through her interim executive, consulting, capability building, and executive coaching work. She also equips product and transformation leaders with the capability everyone expects but no one teaches – how to navigate the people, politics, and performance expectations that come with their jobs.

You can link with Lai-Ling Su on LinkedIn.

Prabhleen Kaur: The Art of Coaching Product Owners on What vs. How

The Great Product Owner: Master of Stakeholder Relationships and the Power of No

“The best PO is the person who has the superpower of saying no, and they can deal with the stakeholders with the same prowess.” – Prabhleen Kaur

Prabhleen describes working with a Product Owner who managed multiple stakeholders—not just a handful, but a significant number with competing priorities. What made him exceptional was his deep understanding of each stakeholder’s pulse and motivations. He knew when to push back and how to frame the “no” in a way that stakeholders could accept. This wasn’t random resistance—it came from thorough preparation manifested in clear roadmaps that made most incoming work predictable for the team.

His user stories stood out for their richness in context: beyond the business requirements, they included information about who would be impacted, which proved invaluable for a team dealing with multiple interconnected systems.

He leveraged JIRA’s priority field effectively, ensuring the moment anyone opened the board, they could immediately understand what mattered most. Prabhleen emphasizes that this PO understood his role as the “what” while respecting the team as the “how.” By maintaining strong stakeholder relationships built on mutual understanding, he created space for the team to prepare, plan, and deliver without constant firefighting.

Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner have the preparation and stakeholder relationships needed to confidently say “no” when priorities compete, or does every request become an emergency?

The Bad Product Owner: Technical Experts Who Manage the Sprint Backlog

“The PO is the what, and the team is the how. When POs start directing the team about how to do things, the sprint goal gets compromised.” – Prabhleen Kaur

Prabhleen addresses a common anti-pattern she’s observed repeatedly: Product Owners with technical backgrounds who cross the line from “what” into “how.” When POs come from developer or technical roles, their expertise can become a liability if they start prescribing solutions rather than defining problems.

They direct the team on implementation approaches, suggest specific technical solutions in user stories, and effectively manage the sprint backlog instead of focusing on the product backlog. The consequences are predictable: stories keep getting added or removed mid-sprint, the sprint goal becomes meaningless, and the team ends up delivering nothing because focus is constantly shifting.

Prabhleen’s solution starts in backlog refinement, where she ensures conversations about technical approaches happen openly with the whole team during estimation. When a PO suggests a specific implementation, she facilitates discussion about alternatives, allowing the team to voice their perspective.

The key insight: everyone comes from a good place—the PO suggests solutions because they believe they’re helping. The Scrum Master’s role is to create space for the team to own the “how” while helping the PO see the value in stepping back.

Self-reflection Question: When your Product Owner has technical expertise, how do you help them contribute their knowledge without directing the team’s implementation choices?

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

About Prabhleen Kaur

Prabhleen is a Certified Scrum Master with 7+ years of experience helping teams succeed with SAFe, Scrum and Kanban. Passionate about clean backlogs, powerful metrics, and dashboards that actually mean something. She is also known for making JIRA behave, driving Agile transformations, and helping teams ship value consistently and confidently.

You can link with Prabhleen Kaur on LinkedIn.