6 Steps to make Team Mitosis

Hey! I am Kate and I work as a Scrum Master at ManyChat.
I have had a great opportunity this fall to split one feature team of 11 people into two newly born feature teams. And that’s the experience I would like to share with other Scrum Masters and Scrum Teams here.

Let’s consider that you already know very well why small teams work more effectively in Scrum and dive straight to the topic of Mitosis. In our case we had 11 people in the team which had new members joined and after running several Sprints together realised that it came to the point of inefficiency when we started noticing:

• the overhead in communication became too evident and created a lot of waste like waiting a long time to come to a majority decision;
• a lot of information was transferred inside the team and it wasn’t always necessary for everyone to learn this new information;
• it became difficult to create a holistic view of the team’s overall progress towards Sprint Goals.

This is when we knew that it was time to split into two new teams out of one huge Godzillaz Team (aka Mobile App Team).
There are companies that prefer to recruit whole new teams from the market while we at ManyChat have Mitosis as a common approach to scale new teams. This approach helps us to preserve cultural identity, specific product and technical domain knowledge inside both new teams.

Things to do before ‘Mitosis’

Let’s dive first into the actual meaning behind this word. Cambridge dictionary describes Mitosis as “the type of cell division in which one cell divides into two cells exactly the same, each with the same number of chromosomes (= cell structures) as the original cell”.

This definition sheds light into why the authors of the Scrum Patterns book decided to name one of their patterns as Mitosis. Just like in the world of biology where cells are divided into two original-like structures “it is important that each resulting Scrum Team remains a Cross-Functional Team after the split, with broad enough coverage of disciplines to be able to autonomously deliver a Product Increment. Each new team should have the authority to work on all parts of the product”.

Keeping all these things in mind, I suggested the team members create the table which would reflect our core competencies to deliver a DONE increment every Sprint. For that we looked at our empirical data of previously DONE PBIs and then at top items of our Product Backlog for the future Sprints. This is how together with the Product Owner we could define most “popular” components and thus competencies that would be needed to deliver each of the Items.

This is how we came to create the following table which demonstrated that we could indeed create two autonomous teams i.e. each able to independently carry out all the work to get PBIs DONE at the end of each Sprint.

Competencies table. Domain knowledge on the vertical, new teams on the horizontal.

For the new teams to be autonomous enough we made sure there was enough domain and product knowledge in each team. Thus it was clear for us that for the future Team A it will be necessary to start hiring new specialists to cover domain knowledge. We also had one Designer in Godzillaz Team. The team decided that it would be better if he tried to participate in both new teams’ lives and we agreed to invest time during the kickoff to discuss structures that will support his participation and knowledge sharing. Keep reading if you want to find out how we solved this!

6 Steps to Facilitate Team Mitosis

And now let’s finally dive straight to the point of actually conducting a Team Mitosis.
This was the Agenda that we had during that day:

Even though we work in a remote-first company, the team and I decided to meet at the office for such a big day since no online communication will replace a real life collaboration, especially for new teams’ kickoff.

STEP 1: Warm Up
This is the starting point for any team event. Why invest time in it? You need people who are energised enough and have a safe space to start working together and warm up is exactly where they can get this energy from, especially after a long time of online collaboration only.

As a simple warm-up we used Liberating Structure: Impromptu Networking with the following open questions:

• My biggest question for today is…
• Today’s event will be a success if….

STEP 2: Opening
To be on the same page about what is going to happen during the day and come to simple rules and agreements with the team on how we will work.
I took a mic as a facilitator here and shared the agenda prepared beforehand for that day and our main goal. We also used this time slot to come up with simple agreements for the day: time breaks, lunch time, collaboration with team mates who weren’t able to come and would connect via Zoom etc.

We came to simple agreements at that point:

1. Having a 50 min work and then pausing for a 10 min break.
2. Having one-two people who will literally carry the laptop with the person in Zoom throughout the day.

STEP 3: Product Backlog and New Teams.
This was an opportunity for us to look at the top Items of the Product Backlog and see what competencies will be needed to deliver valuable features to our customers in the first Sprints. After looking at this Backlog we came up with the setup for our teams by using the teams’ table that we prepared earlier. It was important for us to have autonomous cross functional teams able to take user-oriented Items from the Product Backlog and deliver them on their own.

Product Owner talking about key metrics to validade our assumptions in the next quarter

STEP 4: Coordination between Two Teams

Before Mitosis the team worked in a single team Scrum framework. When you split the whole into two new parts there is always a risk of losing essential information and thus a need for new coordination techniques.
Since this team was splitting into two teams working on the same Mobile App, we decided to invest some time here and discuss how the two teams would collaborate from now on. To come to an integrated result we divided the flip chart into two parts:
1) What and where the two teams need to coordinate
AND
2) How they will coordinate

To make the most out of this exercise the team members worked in groups of three and voiced their opinion once the time was up. To help the teams fill the second part of the flip chart on ‘How we will coordinate work between two teams’, I printed out small cards with events and structures they could use in a new setup. I used coordination and integration techniques proposed in LeSS Framework.

This exercise helped us to come to the following Mobile Area process flow:

The new teams agreed that they would have one or two multi-team PBRs which would enable knowledge sharing and building strong feature teams. The teams would start their Sprints with a multi team Sprint Planning One and then would go on a Single Team Sprint Planning Two. They decided to start their first Sprints without a cross-team Daily event and instead tried sharing their Sprint progress through asynchronous messages in a shared slack channel. And if they would feel like their Sprint Goal is endangered they would use Just Talk technique to coordinate quicker between two teams.
Remember the Designer whose domain knowledge was supposed to be shared between two teams? During this exercise we came to the decision that he will be acting as both a Scout and a Traveller and stay as a member of one team.
We also agreed to check how this new process setup is working out for us during our Overall Retrospective where two teams’ representatives would be invited to discuss system (area) improvements.

STEP 5: New Teams’ Kickoff

After having lunch together, it was high time to actually split into two new teams to start an individual team kickoff. This is an essential activity which helps the new team to come together for the first time, agree on their first rules and even sync on their values for a teamwork environment.

I went to facilitate the kickoff for one team while another team got the Product Owner as a facilitator of their kickoff.
Before diving into the actual kickoff we used metaphoric cards to set the stage. This turned out to be a great opportunity for the team members to realise their new team setup and integrate their team member from Zoom more.

For the kickoff we used the Dilts Pyramid which was divided into two parts for the first three levels to show the Present and the Future of a new team. As a result the team came to understand their roles inside the team and where they see themselves in 3 months, they synchronised on their skills and advantages both in the present and the future. This was an opportunity that the team used to talk about their ambitions, joke on their informal roles in a team and discuss what skills would make their team even better.

Then we climbed to the top levels of the pyramid to talk about team values. We used Triz Liberating Structure where the team members recalled their worst experience in previous teams and the actions that made it so disastrous. This allowed the team to move forward and talk freely about their current values and come to agreement on concrete actions that would support those values further on. While discussing it together the team realised what made their experience of working in a team most exciting and meaningful.

The final stop of the pyramid was dedicated to the team’s identity and it was the time to come up with the new team name. We simply scribed the ideas on sticky notes and then dot voted on the best ones. After having a genuinely exhausting day full of activities the team did not give up and finally came up with the name MFT. Try guessing what this stands for and let me know in the comments :)

And this is how the new MFT team was born in one room 🎉

And KiloWat Team was born in another 🎊

STEP 6: Mobile Area Gathering

Two Teams were born! This was the time to get back together as a new Mobile Area and share the big news with each other: the team names, the kickoff takeaways and agree on the whole Area calendar events.
To reflect on the experience of the whole day filled with many activities, we held a quick Retrospective where everyone shared their key takeaways.

The End!

Here are my personal key takeaways from this experience:

• ‘Feel the room’ when you get to creating the Team’s pyramid. Your team is going to invest a lot of their thinking into it and you will want them to be alive when they get to the final part of the pyramid. Do not forget to include at least 10 min breaks.
• The teams and I were quite exhausted when we got to the point of the final gathering. It’s important to make sure you still have enough energy to make the ‘converge’ part work out for two new teams. Have about two-three techniques for the first Overall Retrospective just to be on the safe side.
• To make sure you have a good kickoff in both new teams, try inviting another Scrum Master for a team you can’t be with. This can also help to collect the unbiased feedback from another Scrum Master on the new team’s dynamics.
• I hope that this article will be beneficial along your own unique journey with Scrum Teams ✌🏼
  Let me know in the comments below what challenges you are facing right now with splitting one team into two OR share your own experience of conducting Team Mitosis 👇🏼