I get the question alot about does agile scale from smaller to larger companies. How do you organize product development when you have 70 engineers versus 700? From my experience is its 90% the same. Scrum teams membership and size should be the same. The main difference is layers in the org to manage the scrum team members, sometimes people on the scrum team wearing multiple hats, and some centralized product and technology operations process/staff. Let’s dive in…
Team Size
◦ Small Organizations:
▪ In small organizations, Scrum teams are typically compact. They consist of a product owner, a technical owner, and a group of engineers and qa( Sometimes engineers are qa). The technical people on the team normally report to the technical owner.
▪ The optimum size for a Scrum Team is usually six to ten members. This size ensures adequate skill sets while maintaining easy collaboration and communication. Smaller teams are nimble and can quickly align, pivot, and adapt2.
◦ Large Organizations:
▪ In larger organizations, the team make-up looks the same. What you normally see is more scrum teams and mode middle managers to manage the scrum teams.
▪ Frameworks like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) or SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) come into play. Also you need some staff such as release train engineers and product operations people to manage and coordinate all the various work streams.
▪ In larger orgs, you may have dedicated roles like scrum masters.
▪ With a much larger org, you see layers. For example, the technical owners do not report to the CTO. They report to a director of engineering, who may report to a VP of Engineering. You can have as many layers as necessary here.
▪ You can also have layers of product management. Roles such as VP of Product or Director of Product reporting to a CPO are common.
Complexity and Coodination
◦ Small Organizations:
▪ A smaller number of teams can manage complexity more easily due to their size.
▪ Communication and management are typically more straightforward.
◦ Large Organizations:
▪ Larger organizations deal with more complex projects and interdependencies.
▪ Coordinating multiple teams becomes crucial.
▪ Frameworks like LeSS and SAFe provide guidelines for managing this complexity. Again needed some release train managers to help manage this.
▪ Product Operations becomes vital here as you need much more analysis help around research and work enabling all the departments across a large company.
Roles and Responsibilities
◦ Small Organizations:
▪ In small teams, roles like product owner and software engineer are typical.
▪ Team members often work on a single project.
◦ Large Organizations:
▪ In larger setups, additional roles like scrum master and quality engineer may emerge.
▪ Team members might work on multiple projects simultaneously.
Definitely, some hair around some of these topics. But…. Generally…. The good news is as you get a strong product fit and product takes off 🚀. You shouldn’t have to change your process drastically. You just add some specialized roles, add in a bit more process, and hire some middle management.