team Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Viktor Glinka: When Internal and External Team Members Have Divergent Goals — The Silent Killer of Agile Teams

“The root causes for destructive team patterns often lie outside the team itself.” – Viktor Glinka

Viktor shares a story from a manufacturing organization where one team stood out — and not in a good way. The team was composed of both internal and external members, and what no one saw coming was that their implicit goals were fundamentally divergent: the external members were focused on maximizing revenue for their own company, while the internal members cared deeply about product quality.

The signs were visible to anyone who approached them — they barely talked to each other and preferred to work individually. When Viktor tried to raise the topic of cooperation and trust, he was met with awkward silence. One team member finally told him: “I don’t want the team to blow up. In my previous experience, I raised this topic and that was the end of the team.” Fear kept the truth underground.

Viktor brought his observations to the manager, who acknowledged the lack of a shared goal as the root cause — but couldn’t fix it because he wasn’t authorized to manage the external people.

The takeaway was clear: three key success factors for any team are the right team composition with people who want to work together, a shared goal that unites diverse perspectives, and clear expectations set by their manager.

In this segment, we talk about LeSS self-designing team workshops and the importance of team composition in scaled setups.

Self-reflection Question: Does your team have a shared goal that everyone — including external members and contractors — genuinely understands and cares about? When was the last time you checked?

Featured Book of the Week: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland

Viktor recommends The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland as the book that sparked his passion for Scrum. As he puts it: “I know the title is very controversial and often criticized, but I could deeply relate to the stories inside the book. They sparked a passion that is still with me.”

Viktor also recommends a bonus book: Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, which showed him the real power of self-organization and validated what he had already started experimenting with in his project management career. It pushed him to explore holacracy, sociocracy, intent-based leadership, and coaching.

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About Viktor Glinka

Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He’s practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability – both in business and in personal life.

You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.

Efe Gümüs: When Daily Stand-ups Become Status Updates — The Warning Signs of a Team Falling Apart

“When people start creating their own bubble inside the team, it’s because they either don’t feel safe, or they don’t feel relevant to what the rest of the team is doing.” – Efe Gümüs

Efe shares the story of an integration team — back-end and front-end developers working across legacy components, a monolithic environment, and a microservices transformation all at once. With so many different workstreams, team members ended up with their own individual projects.

The daily stand-up became a status update: people shared what they were doing, but nobody was listening because nobody else’s work affected them. The daily grew from 15 minutes to 30, sometimes an hour, morphing into an unplanned refinement session.

Participation dropped — some stopped showing up, others attended but went silent. The team that had once been interactive and collaborative splintered into silos. Informal conversations disappeared entirely, and that was when Efe knew it was too late to make small fixes.

Without trust, without a common goal, they were no longer a team — just a group of people sitting together. Then COVID hit, and remote work removed the last chance for accidental collaboration. The daily meeting, Efe realized, is your best radar for team health: pay attention to the energy, the interaction, the engagement — and you’ll see the deeper dynamics before they become irreversible.

Self-reflection Question: How engaged is your team during the daily stand-up right now — and does the level of interaction tell you something about how connected they feel to each other’s work?

Featured Book of the Week: Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

“The book is all about building success mechanisms inside your own mind. If you can set your life goal, then it’s way easier for you to set your career goal, your team goal, your sprint goal.” – Efe Gümüs

Efe’s most influential book isn’t about Agile at all — it’s Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, a psychology book about building success mechanisms in your mind. Recommended by a fellow agile coach, the book helped Efe see the parallels between personal goal-setting and the iterative progress at the heart of Scrum. When you feel lost or stagnating, the exercises in the book help you create small pieces of progress — not quick wins, but genuine forward movement that builds momentum. Efe connects this directly to Agile: every event, every sprint, every review is a small achievement toward the next one. If you can set a clear life goal, setting a sprint goal becomes natural. The clarity of purpose unlocks action — and that’s as true for individuals as it is for teams.

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

About Efe Gümüs

Efe is an out-of-the-box Agile Coach and Scrum Master who brings fresh perspectives to Agile by connecting it with everyday life. He uses metaphors to reveal mindset patterns and applies continuous feedback loops beyond work, including music production and gym training, constantly refining performance, creativity, and personal growth and resilience.

You can link with Efe Gümüs 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.

Bhavin Shukla: The Hidden Cost of Always Saying Yes — How a Helpful Scrum Team Nearly Self-Destructed

“It was sort of making me feel as a Scrum Master, like it’s a slow self-destruction mode they are in. Good intentions, but it wasn’t helping them, and that’s something that they were not able to notice.” – Bhavin Shukla

Bhavin tells the story of a banking team that looked like every Scrum Master’s dream on day one — humming, cracking jokes, in the zone. But underneath the positive energy, the data told a different story. Sprint commitments kept overflowing, tech debt was rising, P1 and P2 production issues were climbing, and decision latency was immense. The root cause? This team of genuinely helpful people couldn’t say no. They wanted to help everyone who came to them, and that desire was slowly drowning them.

No one was giving them feedback about the consequences — missed sprint goals were met with “that’s okay, we’ll do it next sprint.” Bhavin introduced two simple tools: an anonymous happiness meter on the wall (rate 1-5, leave a note if below 3) and a gratitude wall. The data revealed the truth — the team was burning out, handling weekend incidents with no escalation path. Armed with this data, Bhavin coached the team on negotiation techniques: you don’t have to be rude to say no, you can negotiate the yes, you can negotiate the no.

In this segment, we talk about the importance of collecting regular data to surface hidden patterns, and the anti-pattern of teams operating without feedback on the consequences of their decisions.

Self-reflection Question: Is your team’s positive energy masking underlying problems? What data would help you discover whether good vibes are hiding unsustainable patterns?

Featured Book of the Week: Make Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis

Bhavin recommends Make Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis because it goes beyond values and principles to put them into practice in a grounded, system-focused way. “One clear message I get from that book is it’s not the people who are the problem, it’s the system that we need to work on to improve ways of working,” Bhavin shares.

The book introduces concepts like the five thieves of time, visualizing work, dependencies, and bottlenecks — connecting lean thinking, Kanban principles, and behavioral patterns into a practical guide for any Scrum Master looking to understand the systems their teams operate in.

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: When Communication Clarity Matters More Than Technical Complexity, A Healthcare Project That Fell Apart

“Communication clarity is more important than technical complexity, because if you do not understand, it’s pretty hard to execute.” — Iryna Stelmakh

Iryna shares one of her most painful career stories — a project in the healthcare domain focused on cancer treatment research data. When she joined, she was managing around 9 projects simultaneously and agreed to take this one on the condition that a strong technical lead would own the technical direction. The project began with a critical misunderstanding: sales had communicated that the client needed a database redesign, but the client actually needed a migration to a different database type. Similar words, fundamentally different work.

For three months, the team worked through research and discovery phases, trying to understand the actual problem. But communication gaps — compounded by language barriers between the Ukrainian development team and the US-based client — prevented them from identifying the real need in time. Iryna trusted the technical lead’s reports that everything was on track. She relied instead of checking. Eventually, the client lost confidence and left. It remains the only project in her career she considers a genuine failure.

The lesson cuts deep: teams must have people who can ask the right questions early. As Vasco observes, the root cause was implicit assumptions that were never discovered or explored by the different people involved.

In this episode, we also talk about the importance of the monitoring and controlling phase in project management.

Self-reflection Question: When you trust a team member’s assessment that “everything is fine,” what verification steps do you take to confirm that understanding is truly shared across all stakeholders?

Featured Book of the Week: Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

Iryna recommends Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais as a book that changed how she thinks about Agile leadership. “Great agile leadership is not only about frameworks, but it’s about communication, influence, and the ability to align people around shared goals,” she explains. The book helped her understand that Agile isn’t just about team process — it’s about organizational structure, team boundaries, and responsibilities. She also recommends Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss for Scrum Masters who want to sharpen their communication and influence tactics. As Iryna puts it, communication is one of the most important skills a Scrum Master must have.

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.