Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches

Steve Martin: Coaching Product Owners to Be the Voice of the Customer In this episode, we refer to Henrik Kniberg's "Product Owner in a Nutshell" video and Product Ownership by Geoff Watts. The Great Product Owner: Rob Gard's Customer Obsession Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "The role of the PO really is to help the team empathize with the user, the customer of the product, because that's how they can develop great solutions." - Steve Martin   Rob Gard worked at a fintech firm and is now CPO of a major fintech company. Steve describes him as having a brilliant mind and being a real agileist—someone Steve learned a huge amount about Agile from. Rob's defining characteristic was his absolute obsession with the user. Everything focused on customer pain points. Working with engineering teams serving military customers, Rob held regular workshops with those customers to understand their pain firsthand. He was literally the voice of the customer, not theoretically but practically. Rob pushed and challenged teams to be more innovative, always looking for better ways of providing better software. His gift was communication—specifically, briefing the team on the problem rather than just reading out stories in refinement sessions. This is the anti-pattern many Product Owners fall into: going through the motions, reading requirements without context. Real product ownership, as Rob demonstrated, is telling a story that helps the team empathize and understand the pain. When teams can internalize customer problems, they develop better solutions. Rob's ability to communicate the problem into the minds of teams enabled them to serve customers more effectively. This is the essence of great Product Ownership: not being a proxy for management, not juggling multiple teams, but being deeply connected to customer pain and translating that pain into context the team can work with.   Self-reflection Question: Do your refinement sessions tell stories that help the team empathize with customer pain, or do you just read out requirements? The Bad Product Owner: Proxies for Management Instead of Customer Advocates Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "They weren't a team, they were a group of individuals working on multiple different projects." - Vasco Duarte   Steve emphasizes that Product Owners often have great intentions but struggle due to lack of training and coaching. The anti-patterns are systemic: commercial managers "dressed up" as Product Owners without understanding the role. Project managers transitioning to PO roles—though Steve notes PMs can make really good POs with proper support. The most damaging pattern is Product Owners spread across multiple teams, having very little time to focus on any single team or their customers. These POs become proxies—representing the voice of senior management rather than the voice of the customer. They cascade requirements downward instead of bringing customer insights upward. The solution isn't to criticize these struggling Product Owners but to help them understand their role and see what good looks like. Steve recommends Henrik Kniberg's "Product Owner in a Nutshell" video—15 minutes, 15 years old, still profoundly relevant. He also points to Product Ownership by Geoff Watts and formal training like CSPO or IC Agile Product Ownership courses. The fundamental issue is meeting Product Owners where they are, providing coaching and support to transform them from management proxies into customer advocates. When POs understand their role as empathy builders between customers and teams, everything changes.   Self-reflection Question: Is your Product Owner the voice of senior management or the voice of the customer?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Steve Martin   You can link with Steve Martin on LinkedIn.   Steve is an Agile Coach, mentor, and founder of The Agile Master Academy. After over 14 years leading Agile transformation programmes, he's on a mission to elevate Scrum Masters—building high-performing teams, measurable impact, and influence—and raising industry standards of Agile mastery through practical, evidence-led coaching. You can also find Steve's insights on his YouTube channel: Agile Mastery Show.

Steve Martin: Making Scrum Master Success Visible with OKRs That Actually Work Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "It is not the retrospective that is the success of the retrospective. It is the ownership and accountability where you take improvements after the session." - Steve Martin   The biggest problem for Scrum Masters isn't just defining success—it's being able to shout it from the rooftops with tangible evidence. Steve champions OKRs as an amazing way to define and measure success, but with a critical caveat: they've historically been poorly written and implemented in dark rooms by executives, then cascaded down to teams who never bought in. Steve's approach is radically different. Create OKRs collectively with the team, stakeholders, and end users. Start by focusing on the pain—what problems or pain points do customers, users, and stakeholders actually experience? Make the objective the goal to solve that problem, then define how to measure progress with key results. When everyone is bought in—Scrum Master, engineers, Product Owner, stakeholders, leaders—all pulling in the same direction, magic happens. Make progress visible on the wall like a speedometer, showing exactly where you are at any moment. For an e-commerce checkout, the problem might be too many steps. The objective: reduce pain for users checking out quickly. The baseline: 15 steps today. The target: 5 clicks in three months. Everyone can see the dial moving. Everything should focus on the customer as the endpoint. The challenge is distinguishing between targets imposed from above ("increase sales by 10%") and objectives created collaboratively based on factors the team can actually control. Find what you can control first, work with customers to understand their pain, and start from there.   Self-reflection Question: Can you articulate your team's success with specific, measurable outcomes that everyone—from developers to executives—understands and owns? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Post-Retro Actions and Ownership The success of a retrospective isn't the retrospective itself—it's what happens after. Steve emphasizes that ownership and accountability matter more than the format of the session. Take improvements from the retrospective and bring them into the sprint as user stories with clear structure: this is the problem, how we'll solve it, and how we'll measure impact. Assign collective ownership—not just a single person, but the whole team owns the improvement. Then bring improvements into the demo so the team showcases what changed. This creates cultural transformation: the team themselves want to bring improvements, not just because the Scrum Master pushed them. For ongoing impediments, conduct root cause analysis. Create a system to escalate issues beyond the team's control—make these visible on another board or with the leadership team. Find peers in pain: teams with the same problems can work together collectively. The retrospective format matters less than this system of ownership, action, measurement, and visibility. Stop retrospective theatre—going through the motions without taking action. Make improvements real by treating them like any other work: visible, measured, owned, and demonstrated.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Steve Martin   You can link with Steve Martin on LinkedIn.   Steve is an Agile Coach, mentor, and founder of The Agile Master Academy. After over 14 years leading Agile transformation programmes, he's on a mission to elevate Scrum Masters—building high-performing teams, measurable impact, and influence—and raising industry standards of Agile mastery through practical, evidence-led coaching. You can also find Steve's insights on his YouTube channel: Agile Mastery Show.

Steve Martin: Why Agile Fatigue Means We Need to Change Our Approach Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "We teach transformation, we support transformation, we help change, but we don't really understand what they're changing from." - Steve Martin   Steve believes Agile as a whole is on the back foot, possibly regressing. There's palpable fatigue in the industry, and transformation in its current form hasn't been the success we hoped. Organizations still need to work in a state of agility—making rapid decisions, aligning teams, delivering value at pace—but they're exhausted by how we've implemented Agile. As Agile professionals, Steve argues, we have a responsibility to take stock and reflect on what's not working. The problem isn't that organizations don't need agility; it's that we've been force-feeding them frameworks without understanding their context. Steve invokes an ancient principle: "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." But we haven't waited for readiness—we've barged in with Big Bang transformations, bringing 10, 15, or 20 Agile coaches to "save the world." The solution requires meeting people where they are, understanding what they're changing from, not just what they're changing to. Steve's coaching conversation centers on a radical idea: stop trying to help teams that don't want to be helped. Focus on teams already interested in incremental, adaptable delivery. Run small pilots, learn what works, then scale when ready. The age of prescriptive transformation is over. We need to adapt to the reality of the moment, experiment with what works, and have the courage to change the plan when our approach isn't working.   Self-reflection Question: Are you forcing Agile on teams that aren't ready, or are you working with those who genuinely want to improve their delivery approach?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Steve Martin   You can link with Steve Martin on LinkedIn.   Steve is an Agile Coach, mentor, and founder of The Agile Master Academy. After over 14 years leading Agile transformation programmes, he's on a mission to elevate Scrum Masters—building high-performing teams, measurable impact, and influence—and raising industry standards of Agile mastery through practical, evidence-led coaching. You can also find Steve's insights on his YouTube channel: Agile Mastery Show.

Steve Martin: When a Distributed Team's Energy Vanishes into the Virtual Void Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "They weren't a team, they were a group of individuals working on multiple different projects." - Vasco Duarte (describing Steve's team situation)   The infrastructure team looked promising on paper: Product Owner in Italy, hardware engineers in Budapest, software engineers in Bucharest, designers in the UK. The team started with energy and enthusiasm, but within a month, something shifted. People stopped showing up for daily stand-ups. Cameras went dark during meetings. Engagement in retrospectives withered. This wasn't just about being distributed—plenty of teams work across time zones successfully. The problem ran deeper. The Scrum Master had a conflict of interest, serving dual roles as both facilitator and engineer. Team members were simultaneously juggling three or four other projects, treating this work as just another item on an impossibly long list. Steve spent a couple of months watching the deterioration before recognizing the root cause: there was no leadership sponsorship or buy-in. Stakeholders weren't invested. The team wasn't actually a team—they were individuals happening to work on the same project. Steve considers this a failure because he couldn't solve it. Sometimes, the absence of organizational support creates an unsolvable puzzle. Without leadership commitment, even the most skilled Scrum Master can't manufacture the conditions for team success.   In this episode, we refer to The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, a book about organizational culture disguised as a DevOps novel.   Self-reflection Question: Is your team truly dedicated to one mission, or are they a collection of individuals spread across competing priorities? Featured Book of the Week: The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim "There's a lot of good lightning bulb moments that go off." - Steve Martin   Steve describes The Phoenix Project as a book about culture, not just DevOps. Written like a novel following a mock company, it creates continuous light bulb moments for readers. The book resonated deeply with Steve because it exposed patterns he'd experienced firsthand—particularly the anti-pattern of single points of failure. Steve had worked with an engineer who would spend entire weekends doing releases, holding everything in his head, then burning out and taking three days off to recover. This engineer was the bottleneck, the single point of failure that put the entire system at risk. The Phoenix Project illuminates how knowledge hoarding and dependency on individuals creates organizational fragility. The solution isn't just technical—it's cultural. Teams need to share knowledge and understanding, deliberately de-risking the concentration of expertise in one person's mind. Steve recommends this book for anyone trying to understand why organizational transformation requires more than process changes—it demands a fundamental shift in how teams think about knowledge, risk, and collaboration.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Steve Martin   You can link with Steve Martin on LinkedIn.   Steve is an Agile Coach, mentor, and founder of The Agile Master Academy. After over 14 years leading Agile transformation programmes, he's on a mission to elevate Scrum Masters—building high-performing teams, measurable impact, and influence—and raising industry standards of Agile mastery through practical, evidence-led coaching. You can also find Steve's insights on his YouTube channel: Agile Mastery Show.

Steve Martin: When the Gospel of Agile Becomes a Barrier to Change Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "It took me a while to realize that that's what I was doing. I felt the reason wasn't working was them, it wasn't me." - Steve Martin   Steve carried the Scrum Guide like a Bible in his early days as an Agile coach. He was a purist—convinced he had an army of Agile practitioners behind him, ready to transform every team he encountered. When teams questioned his approach, he would shut down the conversation: "Don't challenge me on this, because this is how it's supposed to be." But pushing against the tide and spreading the gospel created something unexpected: resistance. The more Steve insisted on his purist view, the more teams pushed back. It took him a couple of years to recognize the pattern. The problem wasn't the teams refusing to change—it was his approach. Steve's breakthrough came when he started teaching and realized he needed to meet people where they are, not force them to come to him. Like understanding a customer's needs, he learned to build empathy with teams, Product Owners, and leaders. He discovered the power of creating personas for the people he was coaching, understanding their context before prescribing solutions. The hardest part wasn't learning this lesson—it was being honest about his failures and admitting that his righteous certainty had been the real impediment to transformation.   Self-reflection Question: Are you meeting your teams where they are, or are you pushing them toward where you think they should be?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Steve Martin   You can link with Steve Martin on LinkedIn.   Steve is an Agile Coach, mentor, and founder of The Agile Master Academy. After over 14 years leading Agile transformation programmes, he's on a mission to elevate Scrum Masters—building high-performing teams, measurable impact, and influence—and raising industry standards of Agile mastery through practical, evidence-led coaching. You can also find Steve's insights on his YouTube channel: Agile Mastery Show.