Scaling with Agility: A Storybook
Chapter 1
The Little Startup That Could
In the vibrant city of Innovatia, a startup named Happy Solutions dared to dream big. They wanted to solve complex problems with simple, elegant software. Fuelled by passion and late-night coffees, their small team created an app called HappyHealth that unexpectedly went viral.
With thousands of new users flocking to their app, the team struggled to keep up.
Their CEO, Alex, called a meeting:We need to grow, but we can’t lose our agility. How do we scale without breaking?This was the beginning of their agile adventure.
Chapter 2
Introducing the Product Manager
In the heart of Happy Solutions, a critical role emerged: the Product Manager.
The Product Manager, or PM, was the glue that held the vision together. The PM was like a superhero, with powers to:
The PM’s superpowers became a guiding force for Happy Solutions, ensuring that the team stayed on track as they embarked on their journey to scale.
Chapter 3
Introducing the Scrum Master
As Happy Solutions embraced agile practices, another key role emerged: the Scrum Master.
The Scrum Master, often referred to as the servant leader, had superpowers of their own:
The Scrum Master’s superpowers ensured that the team could navigate the complexities of scaling while staying true to agile principles.
Chapter 4
Introducing the Engineer
At the core of building and delivering innovative solutions was the Engineer.
Engineers were the architects and builders of HappyHealth App, armed with superpowers to:
The Engineers’ superpowers turned vision into reality, building the foundation that allowed Happy Solutions to scale and succeed.
Chapter 5
Organising the Dream Team
To tackle the challenges of scaling with agility, Happy Solutions formed a high-performing team with these key roles which will form the building block for the organisation structure:
The Enabling Trio: At the same level in the organisation hierarchy, the Product Manager, Scrum Master, and Engineer worked together to guide and coordinate the team. Each brought unique superpowers to ensure alignment, process efficiency, and technical excellence.
Core Engineers: Accelerating the trio were three additional junior engineers, who contributed hands-on technical expertise to build and optimise the product. They collaborated closely with the trio team to ensure the technical roadmap aligned with business goals.
Contingent Workforce: To handle fluctuating demands, the team included four contingent junior engineers. These flexible team members brought specialised skills and extra bandwidth during peak development periods.
Together, this agile team became a well-oiled machine, with clear roles, mutual trust, and a shared commitment to delivering value to users. They embodied the principles of agility and colocation, ensuring that each member’s strengths were leveraged effectively.
Chapter 6
The Agile Adventure Begins
To solve their scaling dilemma, Happy Solutions decided to adopt agile practices. They invited a Chief Transformation Enabler named Mia to guide them.
"Scaling can be multiple super fast speed boats that can work together to be like a massive ship when required", Mia explained. "To succeed, you need a solid framework, clear communication, aligned autonomy, Organisational Change management, and trust with a massive dollop of empathy!"
The team learned about scrum, kanban, DevOps, Lean Product Management and the principles of agility. They began holding daily standups, retrospectives, and planning sessions. But they also added a twist: instead of blindly following frameworks, they experimented on framework baselines to find what worked best for them based on data
Chapter 7
Growing Pains
As Happy Solutions grew to 50 employees, new challenges emerged.
Teams worked in silos, deadlines were missed, and morale dipped. Alex realized they needed a new approach to maintain agility.
"Mia, what do we do now?" Alex asked.
Mia smiled and said, "Let’s decentralise decision-making. Empower your teams to own their work with aligned autonomy and trust them to make the right calls. We will create just enough intra-team ceremonies like Architecture Council, Product Council and Scrum of Scrum to stay aligned and keep speeding up."
Chapter 8
Organising the Senior Agile Team
As the organisation grew, Happy Solutions introduced a more senior team to oversee and align the efforts of multiple agile teams.
This senior team sat one level higher in the organisational chart and ensured strategic cohesion. The structure included:
The Senior Enabling Trio: The senior team comprised a Senior Product Manager, a Senior Scrum Master, and a Senior Engineer. Each member oversaw their respective domains across all teams and ensured alignment with organizational goals. Importantly, the senior team remained hands-on, dedicating 25% of their time to management and 75% to direct impactful work. They tackled the most challenging and ambiguous tasks, setting an example of excellence, commitment and growing together.
Four Agile Teams: Under the senior trio were four agile teams, each with its own Product Manager, Scrum Master, and Engineer. These teams reported into the senior Enabling team:
The Product Managers from each agile team aligned their roadmaps with the Senior Product Manager to ensure unified product development.
The Scrum Masters from each agile team collaborated with the Senior Scrum Master to maintain process consistency and remove cross-team impediments.
The engineers from each agile team worked with the senior engineer to ensure technical scalability and architecture integrity, as well as shared best practices.
Shared Backlog: All teams operated from a transparent, unified backlog. The leadership trio ensured that the highest-priority items were addressed by allowing the four agile teams to pull tasks first. After these teams selected their work, the senior team pulled the most complex and critical tasks remaining, ensuring that no priority was left unattended.
By limiting work in progress, the backlog remained small enough to not become too much of a cost.
This layered structure allowed Happy Solutions to maintain agility while scaling operations.
The senior leadership trio acted as a guiding force, empowering the teams below them to deliver innovative solutions while staying aligned with the company’s broader vision. To further strengthen aligned practices like architecture council, Product council and Scrum of Scrum were adopted.
Chapter 9
A New Milestone
Years later, Happy Solutions had grown to 200+ employees, spanning three continents.
They faced global challenges—time zones, cultural differences, and scaling technology. Yet, they stayed agile by remembering their roots.
To grow to this size while maintaining its agility, Happy Solutions established another organisational layer.
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This new Principal team included:
Principal Enabling Trio: A Principal Product Manager, a Principal Scrum Master and a Principal Engineer. This team provided strategic direction with 25% capacity and support while remaining connected to the work through 75% hands-on contributions. This was possible as they only 4 direct reports each in four senior-enabled teams they nurtured.
Four Senior Enabling Teams: Each senior Enabling team, similar to the structure described earlier, reported into the Principal Trio. These teams oversaw their own clusters of 4 agile teams each, ensuring alignment and efficiency across the organisation.
With this recursive pattern, Happy Solutions scaled to a 210-member organisation. Each Senior Team managed four agile teams, resulting in 4 x 50 = 200 members. Including the Principal team, this brought the total to 210.
By replicating this pattern, Happy Solutions could scale further while maintaining hands-on leadership and organisational agility. The transparent backlog system ensured work was prioritised effectively, with the highest-priority tasks tackled at every level. Agile principles remained at the core, allowing innovation and collaboration to thrive.
Their story became a beacon for others. Alex often shared this lesson: Scaling doesn’t mean losing agility and autonomy for our team. It’s about creating an environment where innovation thrives at any size.
Chapter 10
Infinite Scaling
Happy Solutions now faced a new challenge: scaling to 1000 employees.
They realised their recursive pattern of organisation could extend further to accommodate thousands of employees while maintaining agility and hands-on leadership.
Here’s how they envisioned it:
Five Layers for Engineering: Engineering roles remained aligned across five levels of seniority: Junior Engineers, Engineers, Senior Engineers, Principal Engineers and Sr Principal Engineers. Each layer ensured technical excellence and knowledge-sharing across the organisation.
Four Layers for Product and Scrum: Product and Scrum roles followed three levels: Product Managers, Senior Product Managers, Principal Product Managers and Sr Principal Product Managers (similar for Scrum Masters). This structure allowed clear ownership and alignment at every level.
Scaling Pattern: Each additional layer increases the organisation's size by 4x. Starting with a 10-member organisation:
Maintaining Hands-On Leadership and Flat Structure: Leadership at every level remained 75% hands-on and 25% management. This approach ensured that leaders were deeply involved in critical, ambiguous tasks, fostering innovation and setting an example for their teams. Only possible with very small number of direct reports at each level.
Unified Backlog System: Work flowed through a single, transparent backlog, with teams pulling tasks in priority order. This ensured alignment and avoided duplication of effort.
This recursive structure allowed Happy Solutions to scale infinitely, maintaining agility, transparency, and a strong connection to its core principles.
Chapter 11
Pathway Framework
Inspired by Happy Solutions’ journey, the Pathway framework was born. This framework offers organisations a clear roadmap for scaling without sacrificing agility or innovation.
Its core elements include:
Chapter 12
The Future of Scaling with Pathway
As organisations evolve, the Pathway framework offers the flexibility to adapt to emerging trends and challenges.
Here’s how the framework can help companies prepare for the future:
Rise of Individual Contributors: With more professionals opting for technical growth over managerial roles, the Pathway framework supports ICs can lead innovation with only a small team of likely skilled team members to enable. IC expertise drives key outcomes and teams grow together with every level improving the same skill.
Artificial Intelligence Integration: As Artificial Intelligence takes on repetitive tasks, teams actual intelligence can focus on strategic and creative work. The framework’s hands-on leadership ensures humans remain at the forefront of problem-solving and decision-making. Many workday tasks are taken care of through AI as per policy implemented as code.
Global Collaboration: In a world of distributed teams, the unified backlog and clear role definitions foster alignment and communication across time zones and cultures. A limited number of job families ensure simplification and clear Roles and Responsibilities.
Adaptable Structures: The recursive scalability of the framework allows organisations to scale up or down based on market needs, ensuring resilience in uncertain times.
By embracing these trends, the Pathway framework positions organisations to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
Chapter 13
Measuring Success
Scaling with agility requires metrics to ensure the framework’s effectiveness.
Here are key metrics for each aspect:
Chapter 14
The Global Giant’s Transformation
Happy Solutions’ success story reached the ears of one of the largest corporations in the world, TitanTech. Known for their massive hierarchies and bureaucratic layers, TitanTech was a giant in the technology industry but struggled with slow decision-making and product delivery cycles.
One day, TitanTech’s CEO, Eleanor Cruz, reached out to Alex, saying, “Your journey inspires me. Can you help TitanTech become agile?”
Alex agreed, but knew this would be no small feat. TitanTech had over 50,000 employees, operations in 30 countries, and a deeply ingrained culture of top-down management. The transformation required a custom approach.
Step 1: Starting SmallAlex proposed piloting the agile framework in one division—TitanTech’s consumer electronics division. A Senior Trio was formed, comprising a Senior Product Manager, Scrum Master, and Senior Engineer. They identified key pain points, such as overlapping projects, unclear priorities, and slow feedback loops, and created a unified backlog to address them.
Step 2: Scaling GraduallyOnce the pilot team demonstrated success—reducing cycle times by 40% and improving customer satisfaction by 25%—the framework was expanded to other divisions. Alex emphasised the importance of hands-on leadership and decentralizing decision-making, even in an organisation as large as TitanTech.
Step 3: Overhauling LeadershipEleanor restructured TitanTech’s leadership teams, introducing the Executive Trio to oversee the agile transformation. Executive Trio formed the Executive team and stayed hands-on. They allocated resources to train leaders and teams, ensuring alignment with the new framework.
Step 4: Cultural ShiftTitanTech’s employees were initially skeptical, fearing that agility meant more work with fewer resources. Through transparent communication and consistent results, the leadership demonstrated that agility fostered empowerment, innovation and growth for all, not chaos.
Step 5: Sustaining MomentumOver three years, TitanTech adopted the recursive scaling model. By embedding hands-on leadership and maintaining a transparent backlog, they transformed from a rigid giant into a nimble innovator.
Products reached the market faster, employee satisfaction soared, and TitanTech regained its position as a market leader.
Eleanor later reflected, “We didn’t just adopt agility; we adopted a mindset of trust and adaptability. Thanks to Alex and Happy Solutions, we rediscovered what it means to innovate.”
Chapter 15
The Power of Simplicity
Simplicity is not just a virtue; it’s a necessity in the world of agility.
The Scrum Guide, a cornerstone of agile methodology, exemplifies this principle with its concise and clear guidance. Happy Solutions embraced this ethos, ensuring their Pathway framework remained simple, understandable, and adaptable.
Why Simplicity Matters?
Clarity in Complexity: As organisations grow, complexity increases exponentially. Simplicity cuts through the noise, ensuring everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and objectives.
Speed of Adoption: A simple framework is easier to implement and adopt across teams and geographies. This ensures quicker alignment and less resistance to change.
Flexibility: Simple frameworks provide just enough structure and are easier to modify and adapt, allowing organisations to respond swiftly to market dynamics.
Empowerment: Teams empowered with a clear, simple structure can make better decisions without constant oversight.Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose are essential for motivation.
Scaling frameworks should emulate the Scrum Guide’s brevity and focus.
Happy Solutions ensured their approach to scaling retained this spirit. Whether it was the unified backlog, recursive team structures, or leadership roles, simplicity was the guiding principle.
As Alex often said, “Scaling agility is not about adding layers of complexity but about creating an environment where simplicity drives efficiency and innovation."
Epilogue
Your Agile JourneyEvery organisations journey is unique. What works for one might not work for another. The key is to remain open to learning, adapting, and growing. Like Happy Solutions, you, too, can scale with agility.
Transformation / Digital innovation / Agile coach
1 个月Love this Varun!
Senior Product Manager at Mastercard
2 个月I love this storybook, Varun! Let’s make it reality!
Manager, Wintel Systems Platform Engineering at Vocalink, a Mastercard company | Security Ambassador | Site Lead ASIA BRG |
2 个月Great perspective
SVP/Engineering Co-Founder, Mastercard Connect. xPratilipi|xPaypal|xIntuit|xCisco
2 个月This is so good! Thanks for sharing.