How I transformed “multiple Scrum teams” into “multiple team Scrum”

Intended audience: Scrum masters, Product owners, Managers and Agile coaches.

I was working with various groups over the last year and noticed some commonalities in the problems they faced. With this blog I want to share some common collaboration problems and solutions I experimented with.

1. Lack of product focus

The lack of product focus is related to a series of underlying product related problems. Firstly, there is often no clearly formulated vision, or a missing plan on how to achieve a vision. The Product Owners are then unsure what needs to be developed. Secondly, there usually are too many PO’s having difficulties to align. People then volunteer to fix these problems. For instance, a lead developer or architect prepares the work for sprints ahead, acting as a proxy between the teams and the PO’s, splitting the requirements in tasks per team. Thirdly, I see multiple over-complex jira-backlogs and lastly there is lots of non-product related work on these backlogs.

I advise to start finding one person to be the single Product Owner for all teams. The other “fake PO’s” should be moved inside the development teams as subject matter experts so they can provide detailed requirements. I avoid having the “we are all dev-team members”…