One product is being built by a single Scrum Team of eighteen people. Communication is slow, the Daily Scrum routinely overruns, and nobody has a complete picture of what is in flight. What does Scrum suggest?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 1. Understanding and applying the Scrum framework medium
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The options
Correct Reorganise into several cohesive Scrum Teams that share the same Product Goal, Product Backlog and Product Owner
Correct. Scrum's answer to a team that has grown too large to stay nimble is more teams, not more structure inside one team — and the shared Goal, Backlog and Product Owner are what keep them building one product rather than three.
Not correct Split into two teams, each with its own Product Owner and its own Product Backlog for the part of the product it owns
Wrong, and it is the split that feels most natural and does the most damage. Two backlogs means two orderings of value for one product, and no single person can then answer what the product should do next.
Not correct Keep the one team but cut the Daily Scrum to five minutes so eighteen people can get through it
Wrong. The fifteen-minute timebox is not the constraint being violated; a team too large to remain nimble is. Compressing the event suppresses the symptom and keeps the cause.
Not correct Appoint a team lead inside the Scrum Team to coordinate the eighteen people
Wrong. Within a Scrum Team there are no sub-teams and no hierarchies. Adding a coordinating layer reintroduces exactly the structure Scrum removed in order to make self-management possible.
Why
A Scrum Team is small enough to stay nimble and large enough to finish meaningful work in a Sprint — typically ten or fewer people, which is guidance rather than a hard limit. When a team outgrows that, Scrum scales by adding teams and keeping the product whole. The rule worth memorising is the one about what stays singular: one product means one Product Backlog, one Product Owner and one Product Goal, however many teams work on it.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Scrum Team
- What it says
- Therefore, they should share the same Product Goal, Product Backlog, and Product Owner.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 1 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
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