Have you ever felt like your team spends more time battling over “resources” (a.k.a. people) than strategizing over what is the highest value work? You’re not alone. Many organizations struggle with this chaos. Many Product Owners are fighting a constant battle over which work is “actually” the highest priority for the organization, juggling dependencies and scrambling for people to do the work.
Picture this: Team A is working on their priorities. But in order to do their work, they need someone from Team B. Often, what happens is that either a person is temporarily taken from Team B and added to Team A or Team B adds work to their Product Backlog to support Team A
Neither of these options is ideal. Here’s why. When teams are frequently reshuffled based on priorities, they can never become a high-performing team. Think about it: would you expect a football team to change players every game? Of course not! Yet we expect software development teams—working on problems infinitely more complex than football plays—to figure out how to collaborate on the fly. That’s totally unreasonable.
On the other hand, constantly expecting Product Owners to request work from each other starts to feel like a game of Whack-A-Mole where work is constantly popping up, and every team is trying to knock it out while squeezing in time for their own priorities.
A Better Way to Work
Instead of fighting for people, let’s change how we work. Rather than organizing teams into silos in the name of false efficiency, organizations must take a step back and define their products. Then, leadership should form dedicated, cross-functional teams to deliver those products.
Imagine this. Each Product is delivered by one or more Scrum teams, but there is only one Product Owner per Product. That means that, together, all of the teams supporting the Product have all of the skills that they need to deliver value. For example, if the Product is a website, the team may consist of content writers, designers, business analysts, testers, user interface designers, and back-end developers. No more fighting for people. No more waiting on dependencies. Everyone we need is on the team.
Here’s how this transforms everything:
Teams stay together, working on one product, rather than being reassembled every few months.
They get better over time, learning how to collaborate and perform at their peak.
Each team works from a single, focused to-do list, instead of competing priorities from different projects.
And if you need to decide between competing priorities? That’s simple. Have one person—just one Product Owner —decide what’s most important overall. That clarity removes chaos and lets teams deliver.
Bring the Work to the Team
Stop scrambling to pull people in every direction. Form stable, cross-functional teams and bring the work to them. When teams stay intact and focus on delivering one product, the results speak for themselves: less chaos, better performance, and more value.
It’s time to stop fighting for people and start building teams that work. Contact Rebel Scrum for a strategic approach to Product Definition for your organization.
To learn more about how multiple teams work together to support a single Product, sign up for Rebel Scrum’s Scaled Professional Scrum course, created by Scrum.org.