Less Is More When You Scale Agile
Engagement at scale looks a lot like engagement without scale.
Close your eyes and imagine you have one small, cross-functional, feature-focused product team. Engagement is high. And their success is too. The team cranks on all cylinders due to healthy doses of autonomy, mastery, and purpose¹.
Autonomy abounds. They have all the capabilities on the team to own delivery of a concept to meet customer needs. Their Agile Leadership trusts them. The team determines how to meet customer needs and the desired business impact. And Agile Leadership provides the environment and support needed to get the job done.
Mastery is a way of life. The mastery the team members seek is not single-faceted. Rather, it is the pursuit of mastery in every capability needed to deliver their product. Every team member strives to develop many skills to help keep work flowing. The atmosphere is one of growth and learning through experimentation and collaboration. Managers demonstrate Agile Leadership by providing a safe environment for this growth. Safety encourages the team to experiment regardless of the outcome. You and the team celebrate failed experiments for the learning value.
Purpose drives them. The team is clear on “why” it exists. Ask any team member and they can express their “why.” Predictive measurements of team performance are not the focus. Rather, the focus is on the value the team produces for its customers and its business. To achieve value, the team has direct engagement with its customers. This allows the team to gain empathy for customer needs. It gives them a sense of purpose. This purpose drives them to unshakable collective ownership while crafting their product. And as a result, product ownership is not isolated to the Product Owner.
A team such as this is a beautiful thing if you have ever witnessed it. Strong, intrinsic motivation courses through their veins. I am fortunate to have been a part of teams where we felt this level of all-encompassing engagement.
But as organizations have scaled to multi-team endeavors, engagement has become diluted. To be honest, I find it rare to witness the same high level of team engagement today at scale. You may be asking why this is the case. I find myself often…
