When the New PO Stops Refining—and the Team Starts Self-Destructing | Olaitan Fashanu

Olaitan Fashanu: When the New PO Stops Refining—and the Team Starts Self-Destructing

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 .

 

"If we're actually doing the job of refining this ticket properly, then we will not be creating this tension in the team." - Olaitan Fashanu

 

The team was working well. They had a strong PO who came to refinement with the problem clearly framed: this is what we want to solve, here's the context, here's the user story, here are the acceptance criteria. The team picked it up, refined it, ran with it. Then change came. A new PO joined—and the routine collapsed. The new PO cared about one thing: hitting the delivery date. Tickets dropped into Jira with no context, no problem statement, no acceptance criteria. Just "this needs to ship by end of month." Within weeks, Olaitan saw the symptoms cascade through the team. Developers asked designers what tickets even meant. QA struggled to maintain quality. Tension built. The diagnosis was clear: refinement had broken. His fix? Bring back the Definition of Ready as a non-negotiable shared standard, and introduce a product trio—business viability, technical feasibility, and design usability collaborating on every story before it reaches the rest of the team.

 

In this segment, we talk about the Definition of Ready and the product trio collaboration model.

 

Self-reflection Question: What's the symptom you're seeing in your team right now—and could the real source be how stories are getting refined, not how they're getting built?

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