How do you scale Agile across many teams?

Question

Accepted Answer

Scaling Agile means coordinating **many teams working on one product** without reintroducing heavyweight, top-down control. The core challenge is keeping autonomy and fast feedback while aligning teams on shared goals and managing dependencies. Several frameworks address this differently.

## The main approaches

| Framework | Idea | Trade-off |
|-----------|------|-----------|
| SAFe | Layered structure, Agile Release Trains, PI planning | Strong alignment; can feel heavy/prescriptive |
| LeSS | Scrum scaled with minimal extra process | Lightweight; demands real org change |
| Spotify model | Squads, tribes, chapters, guilds | Cultural pattern, not a copy-paste framework |

```text
COMMON GOALS WHEN SCALING
- align teams on a shared product vision/roadmap
- make cross-team dependencies visible and managed
- keep each team as autonomous as possible
- preserve fast feedback despite added coordination
```

## Concrete example

Eight teams on one platform adopt a quarterly big-room planning event to align on objectives and surface dependencies, while each team keeps its own Sprint cadence and backlog.

## Common pitfalls

- Copying the "Spotify model" as a rigid blueprint — it was a snapshot, not a product.
- Choosing SAFe for the org chart while ignoring the cultural change required.
- Adding so much coordination that teams lose autonomy and speed.

## Why it matters

Scaling badly recreates the bureaucracy Agile was meant to remove, killing the speed that justified the change.

The right framework depends on context; the skill is matching coordination overhead to the actual level of dependency between teams.

SAFe	Layered structure, Agile Release Trains, PI planning	Strong alignment; can feel heavy/prescriptive
LeSS	Scrum scaled with minimal extra process	Lightweight; demands real org change
Spotify model	Squads, tribes, chapters, guilds	Cultural pattern, not a copy-paste framework