This paper presents practices of a software engineering product team, spread across three countries that successfully scaled up in an agile-scrum setup for a legacy and a mission-critical software system while conforming to stringent regulatory requirements and that too in a matrix organization. Scrum team was a composition of members of different function houses, reporting to different function house heads. Practices highlighted in this paper contributed in successfully scaling up of a small team to 120+ product team with several scrum teams.

This paper underlines challenges faced by different roles and focus areas not defined in scrum-guide like project manager, product manager, and function houses. Our practices show several changes from a traditional way of working where these roles/focus areas together focused on coaching instead managing, in a multisite product team.

Transparency, communication, sustainable continuous improvement ecosystem and traditional large component based team structure were critical factors in scaling up the product team. This paper discusses such challenges and practices such as digital dashboards and OBEYA wall, multilayer communication, collaboration, ecosystems such as OYA day, reading club, A3 problem solving, value stream mapping and open appreciation with Kudos cards, and team structure transformation into smaller cross-functional feature based scrum teams.