How agile Scrum Teams structured in large vs small companies?

Engineering block. Session 1.

Large Companies

Companies with multiple products have assigned product managers to each product with own development teams (up to 20).

Example: PandaDoc has 7 product teams led by Director of product. Each track / lane within a product have Engineering manager (who also looks after BA or Data Analyst) EM, PM. There is no scrum master within teams. The setup they use called The Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) vs Scrum of scrums used by others.

Small Companies

In a smaller companies the Scrum teams may look like this: 8 people (3 front, 2 qa, 1 back).
Small startups is the best example and they usually don’t have scrum masters as no budget. Some companies practice Scrum-ban.

Characteristics:
- autonomy in each teams
- top to bottom approach: OKRs Quarterly -> Brainstorming (incl. the tech team) -> EPIC building -> User stories ->split into task (backlog refinement with the tech team) -> each task is estimated on jira to know their size
- as they run sprints, they know capacity of each one
- team has main goals + buffer for ad hoc in each sprint

During retrospective team adjust the sprint and add more rules, process etc.

Scrum events (both small and large)

All setups with have the following Scrum events (or some of them):

• Sprint Planning Team-Planning (TP) — Product backlog refinement / grooming (why, reset, assign resources)
• Daily Scrum: stand-up with the team (topic: now) Daily leadership (future)
• Sprint goal: Goal of the sprint in line with business goal adjusted to the period. Specific: Test the feature with 5 users (product is tested)
• Sprint review or Demo — celebration
• Sprint Retrospective — problems and issues during the sprint and take it up with the leadership resource planning

ProTip: Have no meetings day — to concentrate on work.

Product library / documentation will have the processes listed, if not available then good to create one.

Tools used:

Jira & Confluence
Coda.io by product operations
Miro.com -collaboration board
MicroApps also interchange
Note: stack can change during the project

Credit: Nataly from PandaDoc + BvOp