Scaling Teams

Leading a fast-growing team is a uniquely challenging experience. Startups with a hot product often double or triple in size quickly—a recipe for chaos if company leaders aren’t prepared for the pitfalls of hyper-growth. If you’re leading a startup or a new team between 10 and 150 people, this guide provides a practical approach to managing your way through these challenges. Each section covers essential strategies and tactics for managing growth, starting with a single team and exploring typical scaling points as the team grows in size and complexity. The book also provides many examples and lessons learned, based on the authors’ experience and interviews with industry leaders. Learn how to make the most of: Hiring: Learn a scalable hiring process for growing your team People management: Use 1-on-1 mentorship, dispute resolution, and other techniques to ensure your team is happy and productive Organization: Motivate employees by applying five organizational design principles Culture: Build a culture that can evolve as you grow, while remaining connected to the team’s core values Communication: Ensure that important information—and only the important stuff—gets through

Leading a fast-growing team is a uniquely challenging experience. Startups with a hot product often double or triple in size quickly—a recipe for chaos if company leaders aren’t prepared for the pitfalls of hyper-growth. If you’re leading a startup or a new team between 10 and 150 people, this guide provides a practical approach to managing your way through these challenges. Each section covers essential strategies and tactics for managing growth, starting with a single team and exploring typical scaling points as the team grows in size and complexity. The book also provides many examples and lessons learned, based on the authors’ experience and interviews with industry leaders. Learn how to make the most of: Hiring: Learn a scalable hiring process for growing your team People management: Use 1-on-1 mentorship, dispute resolution, and other techniques to ensure your team is happy and productive Organization: Motivate employees by applying five organizational design principles Culture: Build a culture that can evolve as you grow, while remaining connected to the team’s core values Communication: Ensure that important information—and only the important stuff—gets through

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

The Go-To Resource for Large-Scale Organizations to Be Agile Rather than asking, “How can we do agile at scale in our big complex organization?” a different and deeper question is, “How can we have the same simple structure that Scrum offers for the organization, and be agile at scale rather than do agile?” This profound insight is at the heart of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum). In Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde have distilled over a decade of experience in large-scale LeSS adoptions towards a simpler organization that delivers more flexibility with less complexity, more value with less waste, and more purpose with less prescription. Targeted to anyone involved in large-scale development, Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, offers straight-to-the-point guides for how to be agile at scale, with LeSS. It will clearly guide you to Adopt LeSS Structure a large development organization for customer value Clarify the role of management and Scrum Master Define what your product is, and why Be a great Product Owner Work with multiple whole-product focused feature teams in one Sprint that produces a shippable product Coordinate and integrate between teams Work with multi-site teams

Lean and Agile Development for Large-Scale Products: Key Practices for Sustainable Competitive Success Increasingly, large product-development organizations are turning to lean thinking, agile principles and practices, and large-scale Scrum to sustainably and quickly deliver value and innovation. Drawing on their long experience leading and guiding lean and agile adoptions for large, multisite, and offshore product development, internationally recognized consultant and best-selling author Craig Larman and former leader of the agile transformation at Nokia Networks Bas Vodde share the key action tools needed for success. Coverage includes Frameworks for large-scale Scrum for multihundred-person product groups Testing and building quality in Product management and the end of the “contract game” between business and R&D Envisioning a large release, and planning for multiteam development Low-quality legacy code: why it’s created, and how to stop it Continuous integration in a large multisite context Agile architecting Multisite or offshore development Contracts and outsourced development In a competitive environment that demands ever-faster cycle times and greater innovation, the practices inspired by lean thinking and agile principles are ever-more relevant. Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development will help people realize a lean enterprise—and deliver on the significant benefits of agility. In addition to the action tools in this text, see the companion book Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrumfor complementary foundation tools.

Improve and Accelerate Software Delivery for Large, Distributed, Complex Projects The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org–the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization founded by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber–Nexus draws on decades of experience to address the unique challenges teams face in coming together, sharing work, and managing and minimizing dependencies. The NexusTM Framework for Scaling Scrum is a concise book that shows how Nexus helps teams to deliver a complex, multi-platform, software-based product in short, frequent cycles, without sacrificing consistency or quality, and without adding unnecessary complexity or straying from Scrum’s core principles. Using an extended case study, the authors illustrate how Nexus helps teams solve common scaling challenges like reducing cross-team dependencies, preserving team self-organization and transparency, and ensuring accountability. Understand the challenges of delivering working, integrated product increments with multiple teams, and how Nexus addresses them Form a Nexus around a new or existing product and learn how that Nexus sets goals and plans its work Run Sprints within a Nexus, provide transparency into progress, conduct effective Nexus Sprint reviews, and use Nexus Sprint Retrospectives to continuously improve Overcome the distributed team collaboration challenges

Establish business agility in your organization by applying industry-proven scaling strategies from popular Scrum frameworks such as Scrum of Scrums (SoS), Scrum@Scale, Nexus, Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), Disciplined Agile, and SAFe Key FeaturesLearn how to be Agile at scale by implementing best practicesUnderstand how Lean-Agile practices are incorporated in Disciplined Agile and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)Customize Scrum and Lean-Agile practices to support portfolio and large product development needsBook Description Scaled Scrum and Lean-Agile practices provide essential strategies to address large and complex product development challenges not addressed in traditional Scrum. This Scrum/ Lean-Agile handbook provides a comprehensive review and analysis of industry-proven scaling strategies that enable business agility on an enterprise scale. Free of marketing hype or vendor bias, this book helps you decide which practices best fit your situation. You'll start with an introduction to Scrum as a lightweight software development framework and then explore common approaches to scaling it for more complex development scenarios. The book will then guide you through systems theory, lean development, and the application of holistic thinking to more complex software and system development activities. Throughout, you'll learn how to support multiple teams working in collaboration to develop large and complex products and explore how to manage cross-team integration, dependency, and synchronization issues. Later, you'll learn how to improve enterprise operational efficiency across value creation and value delivery activities, before discovering how to align product portfolio investments with corporate strategies. By the end of this Scrum book, you and your product teams will be able to get the most value out of Agile at scale, even in complex cyber-physical system development environments. What you will learnUnderstand the limitations of traditional Scrum practicesExplore the roles and responsibilities in a scaled Scrum and Lean-Agile development environmentTailor your Scrum approach to support portfolio and large product development needsApply systems thinking to evaluate the impacts of changes in the interdependent parts of a larger development and delivery systemScale Scrum practices at both the program and portfolio levels of managementUnderstand how DevOps, test automation, and CI/CD capabilities help in scaling Scrum practicesWho this book is for Executives, product owners, Scrum masters, development team members, and other stakeholders who need to learn how to scale Agile to support large, complex projects and large enterprise portfolios and programs will find this book useful. A basic understanding of the values and principles of Agile and the Scrum-based framework for Agile development practices is required before you get started with this Agile Scrum book.

Lean Development and Agile Methods for Large-Scale Products: Key Thinking and Organizational Tools for Sustainable Competitive Success Increasingly, large product-development organizations are turning to lean thinking, agile principles and practices, and large-scale Scrum to sustainably and quickly deliver value and innovation. However, many groups have floundered in their practice-oriented adoptions. Why? Because without a deeper understanding of the thinking tools and profound organizational redesign needed, it is as though casting seeds on to an infertile field. Now, drawing on their long experience leading and guiding large-scale lean and agile adoptions for large, multisite, and offshore product development, and drawing on the best research for great team-based agile organizations, internationally recognized consultant and best-selling author Craig Larman and former leader of the agile transformation at Nokia Networks Bas Vodde share the key thinking and organizational tools needed to plant the seeds of product development success in a fertile lean and agile enterprise. Coverage includes Lean thinking and development combined with agile practices and methods Systems thinking Queuing theory and large-scale development processes Moving from single-function and component teams to stable cross-functional cross-component Scrum feature teams with end-to-end responsibility for features Organizational redesign to a lean and agile enterprise that delivers value fast Large-scale Scrum for multi-hundred-person product groups In a competitive environment that demands ever-faster cycle times and greater innovation, applied lean thinking and agile principles are becoming an urgent priority. Scaling Lean & Agile Development will help leaders create the foundation for their lean enterprise—and deliver on the significant benefits of agility. In addition to the foundation tools in this text, see the companion book Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum for complementary action tools.