# The Counterintuitive Fix—How Collapsing the Jira Board Sparked Collaboration | Aliu Adewale

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/scrum-master-toolbox-podcast-agile-storytelling-from-the-trenches-445588/the-counterintuitive-fix-how-collapsing-the-jira-board-sparked-collaboration-aliu-adewale
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/scrum-master-toolbox-podcast-agile-storytelling-from-the-trenches-445588/the-counterintuitive-fix-how-collapsing-the-jira-board-sparked-collaboration-aliu-adewale.md
Podcast: [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches](https://stenobird.com/podcast/scrum-master-toolbox-podcast-agile-storytelling-from-the-trenches-445588)
Published: 2026-07-07T10:05:00+00:00
Episode link: https://scrummastertoolbox.libsyn.com/the-counterintuitive-fixhow-collapsing-the-jira-board-sparked-collaboration-aliu-adewale
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/scrummastertoolbox/20260707_Aliu_Adewale_Tue.mp3?dest-id=246429
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/scrum-master-toolbox-podcast-agile-storytelling-from-the-trenches-445588/episodes/the-counterintuitive-fix-how-collapsing-the-jira-board-sparked-collaboration-aliu-adewale
Duration seconds: 1023

## Resource

Aliu Adewale: The Counterintuitive Fix—How Collapsing the Jira Board Sparked Collaboration 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 . "Collaboration is the foundation of a successful Scrum team." - Aliu Adewale Aliu walked into a team where the daily standup was theater. Developers delivered their tickets and forgot about them. QA picked up "their" column. Front-end, back-end, senior architect, junior developer—everyone was a champion of their own silo. Nobody engaged during refinement. Nobody called anything out. The board had close to ten columns, one per specialty, and it was working exactly as designed: as a handoff system. Aliu's diagnosis is sharp—the foundation of the team's problem wasn't the people; it was the tool. The Jira board was visualizing silos and the team was living up to it. The fix was counterintuitive: he collapsed the board from nine columns to three— To Do, In Progress, Done. Once "In Progress" was the only place where work lived, nobody could hide. A QA needing to know when a ticket would be ready had to talk to the developer. A stakeholder asking for status meant everyone on the ticket had to communicate. The team had no choice but to collaborate. As Vasco frames it in the episode: by creating the smaller problem of "hiding status," Aliu solved the bigger problem of "no collaboration." Sometimes you have to make things a little worse so they can get much better. In this segment, we refer to the Agile value individuals and interactions over processes and tools , and to the recognition that the tools we choose shape the behaviors we get. Self-reflection Question: Is your Jira board designed to enable collabor…

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