user stories Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Mirco Gerling: The Hydra Product Owner and the PO Who Made Trust Possible

The Great Product Owner: Precision That Builds Team Trust

“He always had an answer, or if he didn’t have the answer, he tried to ask the clients, the users, the stakeholders.” – Mirco Gerling

In pharmaceutical software, the wrong dose can kill someone. So when Mirco worked with a PO in that domain, precision wasn’t a virtue — it was a survival requirement. The PO wrote meticulous user stories in classic “As a user, I want… so that…” format with very good acceptance criteria.

The developers always knew what done meant. And when, mid-sprint, the team spotted a gap — “Is 80% tolerance of 100% or 80% of all?” — the PO was there, asking the right people, refining or splitting the story, never letting ambiguity ship. Even when half the team was out sick in winter, the remaining developers could deliver because the user stories were clear enough to stand on their own. Stories linked to automated tests.

Each acceptance criterion traceable to the test that proved it. The result: a team that trusted their PO. As Mirco puts it, that trust came from one thing — the PO had already done the work needed to help the team understand what to do and how they’d know it was done.

Self-reflection Question: What’s the level of precision in your team’s user stories signaling to your developers about how much you trust them — and how much you’ve prepared for them?

The Bad Product Owner: The Hydra PO with Seven Heads

“If the developers had questions, the people said: ‘it’s not my ticket, it’s not my story.'” – Mirco Gerling

Five Scrum teams. One Product Owner. Seven requirements engineers writing user stories alongside. Eight people doing the work of product ownership — and nobody owning any of it. Developers learned quickly that asking a question meant being bounced from one requirements engineer to another. “It’s not my ticket.” The eight-person PO group split into two sub-teams who, when they spoke about each other, used “you” and “they” instead of “we.”

Decisions made in week one collided with decisions made in week three. Mirco’s intervention: treat the PO group like a Scrum team. Eight people is a team-sized group. Run retrospectives with them. Get them communicating as a unit instead of as parallel individuals.

The one anchor that kept things from completely falling apart was the single PO at the top, who could still say “this feature we need at the end of the year, the other can wait.” Without unified prioritization, the hydra has no direction — just seven heads pulling in seven ways.

Self-reflection Question: Where in your product organization are decision-makers proliferating without a shared mandate — and what’s the cost in clarity for the teams downstream?

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About Mirco Gerling

Mirco is an experienced Scrum Master in the public sector. With a strong IT background, he has spent 25 years developing software and driving agile transformations. Passionate about innovation and teamwork, Mirco brings expertise and dedication to every project.

You can link with Mirco Gerling on LinkedIn.

Nate Amidon: When the Blame Game Between Product and Engineering Destroys Your Scrum Team From the Inside

“Product and engineering are in the same boat. We need to visualize and internalize that it’s one team, one fight.” – Nate Amidon

Nate was working as a Scrum Master on a full-stack team building an internal mobile application when he noticed tension forming between product and engineering. It started small — finger-pointing about missed requirements — but quickly escalated into a full-blown blame game. The QA started siding with product, creating a product-and-QA-versus-engineers dynamic. Engineers began refusing user stories unless they were “100% baked” with every detail spelled out, turning the team into lawyers negotiating contracts rather than collaborators building software. What’s revealing about this pattern is what it looks like from the outside: a project manager might see meticulously detailed user stories and think the team is doing great work. In reality, it’s a symptom of broken trust. Nate points out that in high-performing teams, you actually see less detail in the issue tracker — because people are talking, aligned, and adapting together in real time. His approach? He drew stick figures in a boat on sticky notes — one labeled PO, the other Engineering — and stuck them on people’s monitors. Simple, visual, and direct: you’re in the same boat.

Self-reflection Question: What are the smells you’re noticing in your team’s interactions — and could overly detailed user stories actually be masking a deeper trust problem between product and engineering?

Featured Book of the Week: Deep Work by Cal Newport

Nate recommends every Scrum Master read Deep Work, and here’s why: “Shoulder taps are expensive. If you go and bother an engineer that’s in the zone, in deep work, you’re adding about a 15-minute reset for them to get back into that zone.” For Nate, safeguarding engineers’ time is one of the most important things a Scrum Master can do. He also recommends Project to Product by Mik Kersten for Scrum Masters moving into Agile coaching — especially its emphasis on team structure and why “the team needs to be sacrosanct, and work should go to teams.”

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

About Nate Amidon

Nate, founder of Form100 Consulting, and a former Air Force officer and combat pilot turned servant leader in software development. Nate has taken the high-stakes world of military aviation and brought its core leadership principles—clarity, accountability, and execution—into his work with Agile teams.

You can link with Nate Amidon on LinkedIn. Learn more at Form100 Consulting.

Karim Harbott: From Requirements Documents to Customer Obsession—Redefining the PO Role

The Great Product Owner: Strategic, Customer-Obsessed, and Vision-Driven

“The PO role in the team is strategic. These POs focus on the customer, outcomes, and strategy. They’re customer-obsessed and focus on the purpose and the why of the product.” – Karim Harbott

Karim believes the industry fundamentally misunderstands what a Product Owner should be. The great Product Owners he’s seen are strategic thinkers who are obsessed with the customer. They don’t just manage a backlog—they paint a vision for the product and help the entire team become customer-obsessed alongside them.

These POs focus relentlessly on outcomes rather than outputs, asking “why are we building this?” before diving into “what should we build?” They understand the purpose of the product and communicate it compellingly.

Karim references Amazon’s “working backwards” approach, where Product Owners start with the customer experience they want to create and work backwards to figure out what needs to be built. Great POs also embrace the framework of Desirability (what customers want), Viability (what makes business sense), Feasibility (what’s technically possible), and Usability (what’s easy to use). While the PO owns desirability and viability, they collaborate closely with designers on usability and technical teams on feasibility.

This is critical: software is a team sport, and great POs recognize that multiple roles share responsibility for delivery. Like David Marquet teaches, they empower the team to own decisions rather than dictating every detail. The result? Teams that understand the “why” and can innovate toward it autonomously.

Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner paint a compelling vision that inspires the team, or do they primarily manage a list of tasks?

The Bad Product Owner: The User Story Writer

“The user story writer PO thinks it’s their job to write full, long requirements documents, put it in JIRA, and assign it to the team. This is far away from what the PO role should be.” – Karim Harbott

The anti-pattern Karim sees most often is the “User Story Writer” Product Owner. These POs believe their job is to write detailed requirements documents, load them into JIRA, and assign them to the team. It’s essentially waterfall disguised as Agile—treating user stories like mini-specifications rather than conversation starters. This approach completely misses the collaborative nature of product development.

Instead of engaging the team in understanding customer needs and co-creating solutions, these POs hand down fully-formed requirements and expect the team to execute without question. The problem is that this removes the team’s ownership and creativity. When POs act as the sole source of product knowledge, they become bottlenecks.

The team can’t make smart tradeoffs or innovate because they don’t understand the underlying customer problems or business context. Using the Desirability-Viability-Feasibility-Usability framework, bad POs try to own all four dimensions themselves instead of recognizing that designers, developers, and other roles bring essential perspectives. The result is disengaged teams, slow delivery, and products that miss the mark because they were built to specifications rather than shaped by collaborative discovery. Software is a team sport—but the User Story Writer PO forgets to put the team on the field.

Self-reflection Question: Is your Product Owner engaging the team in collaborative discovery, or just handing down requirements to be implemented?

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

About Karim Harbott

Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.

You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.

Shawn Dsouza: Beyond Product Knowledge—The Hidden Skills Every Product Owner Needs

Shawn explores both ends of the Product Owner spectrum through real experiences. On one side, he addresses the “Forced” or “Accidental” Product Owner—a common but problematic pattern where organizations appoint someone based solely on product knowledge. He shares the story of a QA professional thrust into the PO role who knew the product inside out but lacked other essential PO skills, frustrating the team with inadequate responses. Through coaching questions inspired by “The Advice Trap,” Shawn helped this reluctant PO reflect on responsibilities and develop confidence beyond technical knowledge.

The Great Product Owner: The Story-Crafting Superstar

Shawn celebrates a Product Owner who elevated user story writing to an art form—”the Picasso of writing user stories.” This exceptional PO co-crafted clear, well-structured stories with the team and used AI to refine stories and acceptance criteria. Her meticulous preparation included intensive refinement sessions before vacations and expert story slicing techniques. By handling requirements clarity superbly, she freed the team to focus entirely on problem-solving rather than deciphering what needed to be built.

The Bad Product Owner: The Forced/Accidental Product Owner

Organizations frequently make the mistake of appointing the person with the highest product knowledge as Product Owner, assuming technical expertise translates to PO effectiveness. However, the Product Owner role requires diverse skills beyond product knowledge—stakeholder management, prioritization, communication, and strategic thinking. When a QA professional was thrust into this role, their deep product understanding couldn’t compensate for underdeveloped PO competencies, leading to team frustration and project complications.

In this segment, we refer to the Coach Your PO e-course published by your Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast!

Self-reflection Question: What skills beyond domain expertise should you develop or look for when transitioning into or selecting someone for the Product Owner role?

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 Shawn Dsouza
Shawn, a Mangalore native and Software Technology postgraduate from AIMIT, brings 8+ years of IT expertise, excelling as a Scrum Master fostering innovation and teamwork. Beyond technology, he leads SPARK, a social service initiative, and pursues his passion as an aquarist, nurturing vibrant aquatic ecosystems with dedication.

You can link with Shawn Dsouza on LinkedIn.

Substack Week: AI in Product Management, Enhancing Product Development Through Artificial Intelligence with Toni Dos Santos

In this Substack Week episode, we explore how artificial intelligence is transforming product management with Toni Dos Santos, co-author of The Product Courier newsletter. From automating routine tasks to enhancing strategic decision-making, Toni shares practical insights on leveraging AI to build better products faster and more efficiently.

From Music to Banking to AI Product Management

“I wanted to work in that area to find ways to put innovation to service to the consumers, and making it as invisible as possible.”

Toni’s journey into AI and product management began in an unexpected place – the music industry. After working as a music producer, his interest in innovation led him to banking, where he discovered the untapped potential of data analytics. His experience working with machine learning and deep learning in banking laid the foundation for his current work with generative AI in product management. The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 sparked his deep dive into applying AI to product management challenges.

Revolutionizing User Story Creation with AI

“User stories are a big pain for many product managers, particularly junior ones… The idea is that you provide the AI with a PRD or description of the product, and it’s going to write user stories based on best practices.”

Toni explains how AI can transform the process of writing user stories by automating the initial drafting while preserving the essential collaborative aspects. He emphasizes that while AI can handle the mechanics of writing, the real value comes from using it as a springboard for deeper discussions with the team. The technology can suggest edge cases, highlight potential gaps, and provide a structured foundation for further refinement.

AI as a Tool for Understanding User Needs

“Use all the transcripts, the feedback from user interviews that I have, feed it to AI and retrieve from it the key pain points, the major patterns that it identifies.”

Continue reading Substack Week: AI in Product Management, Enhancing Product Development Through Artificial Intelligence with Toni Dos Santos