How can you scale Scrum Teams? How can you make sure that as your company grows you have the framework in place to scale with the growth?

1. Ashley-Christian Hardy
How to Scale Scrum Teams

2. Hi, I’m Ashley-Christian Hardy
In Progress…
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3. How do you scale scrum teams?
Growing teams
There is a tipping point in every organization; that point where your product or company starts to get
some traction and demand rapidly starts to increase.
There is a point where you need to seriously start to consider about scaling your team structure. If
you don’t, you will find you will grow very quickly and you will get to a point where your team
organization will prevent further growth, hinder innovation, reduce efficiency and your ability to deliver
quickly.
I have seen it before, company’s that have scaled too big and not thought about how their teams
might function in the future, and their ability to adapt to change and with the company growth. These
teams get bogged down with dependencies, internal politics and generally poor communication
between them. They find themselves in a ‘silo’ structure, fighting for resource and capacity.

4. How do you scale scrum teams?

5. How do you scale scrum teams?
Here you have business teams that are split based on product, and they usually have their own
visions and goals and don’t really communicate or collaborate with other product managers for
the most part.
You then find that development teams are split into component teams… because originally it was
thought to be a good idea to put people with the same skill sets into the same teams; and why
not – its done with most other business functions such as operations, finance, HR.
What you quickly come to realize that actually this is not very effective.

6. Using Scrum Teams
So you have taken the plunge and implemented scrum. You have your
cross functional, autonomous scrum teams, working on loosely coupled
features.
When working on individual features that are not dependent on each
other this is great. Each team can deliver frequent value with their
dedicated resource and not have to worry too much about what
everyone else is doing.

7. How do you scale scrum teams?
As we all know though, this is often not the case. What
happens when your company is going large strategic
programs where all teams must work together, or you
have some feature teams that are working on functions
that are all close together.
A lot of co-ordination needs to be done between
the product owners to ensure that everyone is in line,
each knows what's in their scope and ensure
everything is being done at the right time. In scaled
agile framework you would have a program manager
leading the project; but co-ordination still needs to be
there.
How do we manage this?

8. Product Management Scrum Team
In this example, you have a Chief Product Owner
who leads the team with regards to high level
priorities, and the other product owners form the
scrum team. You can apply the same artifacts of
scrum, to ensure everyone is in line:
• Sprint Planning
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospectives
• Daily Stand ups

9. Scaled Teams

10. Scaled Teams
Everyone is in communication and its easy to ensure all efforts are coordinated.
This model is also future proof, so you can ‘plug; a new scrum team into this model, or take it
out and put in another one.
Some examples from my experience where this works well:
• If you are a company that offers different products; so under the same umbrella or group –
but these products are completely independent. You can apply this model to each product.
• If you are a company with one product, but different business units that are loosely coupled,
you apply this model to each business unit (for example: payments team, finance team,
player account team…).
You do not even have to stop there, this model is scalable going up; so one tier above the
Product Management Scrum Team you can apply a Program Management Scrum Team to
ensure larger business strategies are in line

11. Summary
We all have problems with team structure and company architecture, and to be honest there is
no silver bullet or out of the box framework that can help all teams; but I have found the above
the most useful.
Its easy to adapt and change to fit your needs, and its future proof for any changes that may
come your way in the future.
Most of us have probably been in the situation of seeing company restructures, takeovers and
organizational changes. companies launching or acquiring new products – I have found for the
most part, this ‘plug & play’ approach works quite well.

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13. Thank you!
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