Where it started
When we came in, the company was a start-up with 4 people, little know-how and a limited budget. To develop without much risk, external developers joined. That took a lot of trust, on both sides.
Over more than five years it grew into a mid-sized company with almost 200 people and around 1,000 customers. Along the way, an investor bought four separate companies and merged them into one. Afterwards, around 12 teams somehow had to work together.
How the bottleneck showed
At first the team had no idea how to organise itself for this kind of work. The product owner quickly became the bottleneck: he had to do a lot of project management, was good with stakeholders, but hardly knew any methods. There was exactly one dev lead through whom everything went. Sprints ran without data and without experiments, and product development was rather aimless.
After the merger, four company cultures came on top. The new company could not get running or delivering, and not even discovery worked.
Where it came from
The structure had been built for four people and never grew along. After the merger, the old structures of the four companies simply lived on. Each had built its technology to fit its own organisation, exactly as Conway’s Law describes. The result was four tech stacks building the same things twice, although the merger had made sharing resources possible. On top of that, the tech stack lagged behind what customers wanted.
What we did
Organisation
We cut the organisation anew along the shared customer value stream and aligned the teams to end-to-end business cases. We broke up the position of the single dev lead, so that decisions no longer depend on one person. We built up and structured the entire development organisation, with DevOps, UI, test, development and data.
Top and middle management learned to lead agile teams laterally. We demanded direct communication and lived it ourselves until it became normal.
Process
We introduced Scrum and corrected it once more later, when it was clear what did not fit. As the company grew to around 12 teams, elements from Scrum of Scrums, LeSS, SAFe and OKR came in, each only as far as they helped. We aligned the product owners on shared goals through OKRs and agile portfolio management.
Refinement became simpler and more practical, and sprints got goals. We designed reviews so that sales could also make sense of what development had built.
IT
We took the tech stack to the next stage of growth: one common stack with Java, Spring Boot and Vue.js, an AWS strategy with Docker and Terraform, and a central solution for customer data and identities. We merged the duplicated systems step by step, among other things with the strangler fig pattern. We cleaned up the source code and made it honest.
What stays
The operating model fits the client, their market and their people, and still works well there today. The teams plan strategically and tactically, and their outcome has become more predictable. People leaving or joining the teams can be absorbed well since then.
