You send out new ceremony guidelines. "Only core team members in Agile ceremonies. Stakeholders can submit requirements through the Product Owner."
Your Scrum Master nods approvingly. The team breathes a sigh of relief. Finally, they can work.
Week 1: Meetings are manageable again. Productivity increases. This might actually work!
Week 2: You notice the Product Owner keeps saying "yes" to everything stakeholders request. The backlog is exploding again.
"Aren't you supposed to gatekeep?" you ask.
"I'm being customer-focused!" they reply cheerfully.
Week 3: The Product Owner adds Marketing's entire wishlist to the current sprint. "They said it was urgent," PO explains.
Week 4: The PO brings the CFO into sprint planning "just to observe." The CFO starts contributing requirements. The PO nods enthusiastically.
Week 5: You realize your Product Owner thinks their job is to be a middleman for stakeholder demands, not a filter. They're a requirements fire hose, not a gatekeeper.
Every time you enforce boundaries, the PO undermines them by being "collaborative" and "customer-centric."
The project fails under scope creep. In the post-mortem, the PO says: "We just needed to be more Agile."