Create teams for your goals, not goals for your teams
Fluid Scrum Teams Organize Around Meaningful Work
Fluid Scrum Teams Organize Around Meaningful Work
Fluid Scrum Teams organize themselves based on the work at hand. Every time new topics need to be addressed, the people organize themselves to optimize the chances to overcome their challenges and meet their goals. The pool of people of around 15 to 50 is a stable and cohesive team to create and sustain a product. They form smaller teams each Sprint to maximize their effectiveness in achieving their goals.
If you wish to learn more about Fluid Scrum Teams, you can find links to earlier articles below. Fluid Scrum Teams are an answer to many anti-patterns around goals. In this article, I will discuss these anti-patterns and explain how Fluid Scrum Teams address them.
Goals and Anti-Patterns
Scrum Teams work towards goals. Many people have bad experiences with goals. There are plenty of ways to misuse them. Here are some examples:
Output instead Outcome
You defined goals that aren’t about meeting the larger objective. You merely created an incentive to successfully complete a topic in a way that was deemed to be best in advance. Teams are incentivized to follow a path instead of discovering the right path.
The goal could be something like this: “Build the product according to the specifications.”
In these cases, the ultimate objective might even be unclear or unknown. These types of goals lead to feature factories. Teams focus on delivering a predefined output without checking the desired outcome.
Goals are split per team / pushed to the team
Another anti-pattern is chopping the company objectives into smaller pieces per department and then even chopping them up more per team. This way teams get work instructions that they have to work on in isolation.
The total picture is lost and teams work on the goals in silos. This silo behaviour leads to a mess. The pieces of the puzzle don’t fit and the overall objective isn't met.
Back office teams get goals to
Team goals have no relation with the overall goals
Goals are everywhere in organizations. Often, goals are set without considering the overall objectives of the organization. Teams define goals that are not in line with the company's priorities.
This is especially prominent when one Product Owner serves one autonomous team. They have their own view on how to optimize their feature or component. They don’t look at the product as a whole and what this means for their little piece of the total puzzle.
Goals as they should be
My dear colleague Gunnar Fischer has the following strong statement about goals:
“Create teams for your goals, not goals for your teams” — Gunnar R. Fischer
This sums it up brilliantly. This bit of advice helps to repair anti-patterns I discussed:
Your teams will pull the goal they wish to address.
The teams will not chop a goal into smaller pieces. Instead, they will assess how they can contribute to achieving the goal.
The teams will organize around achieving the goal.
Multiple teams will align to work towards the goal.
Teams know they work on something meaningful as they are working on a clear company objective.
By the way, it only works when you ensure you have a limited number of (outcome-oriented) company objectives, goals you wish to achieve.
Fluid Scrum Teams and meaningful work
The primary objective of Fluid Scrum Teams is to organize around goals in a complex product environment. As they are a larger pool of people, typically between 15 and 50, they have the opportunity to have the best possible alignment between company objectives and the product objective, the Product Goal.
The pool of people will not work on a small piece in isolation, they have the complete product experience, or the complete value stream, in mind when they define the Product Goal.
This product-overarching Product Goal is the perfect base for the Product Owner to propose the (multiple) Sprint Goals. These Sprint Goals are related, aligned with the Product Goal, linked with the company objectives AND the most valuable next steps for the product.
The pool of people can then organize around the Sprint Goals to optimize the chances of meeting them. This team exists to achieve its goals in an environment where the people don’t exactly know what will happen, what they will have to create next, which combination of skills they need next. But being a pool of people with many skills, they are well equipped to tackle them.
Fluid Scrum Teams vs other scaling approaches
There are other ways to have multiple teams work towards one Product Goal. I wrote about 6 approaches to scale Scrum before. These are LeSS, SAFe, Nexus, Scrum@Scale, Spotify Culture, and Scrum of Scrums. I also wish to highlight that vanilla Scrum is a great alternative.
All of them have in common that they propose multiple small cross-functional teams. There are differences in the way the teams pull work and define their Sprint Goal. But generally, there is a collaboration about which team is going to pursue which Sprint Goal and how this aligns with the Product Goal. This is no different with Fluid Scrum Teams.
The major difference is how Fluid Scrum Teams can have different compositions for every Sprint, tailored to achieving their Sprint Goals. The other approaches all don’t have this flexibility. They will encounter many situations where the Sprint Goal needs to be amended to fit the team. Something you wish to avoid.
I have experienced that Fluid Scrum Teams have a lot of flexibility required for a complex environment. More than with the scaling of other approaches.
Final thoughts
Fluid Scrum Teams is a great approach to organizing your teams around your goals. The pool of people has many people with unique skills that can organize in temporary subteams that have the highest chances of meeting the Sprint Goals.
They allow for a view of the total product experience and on collaboration towards the larger objective. Other scaling approaches are limited. They force the teams to tailor the goals to fit their expertise. This is something you wish to avoid because you should “Create teams for your goals, not goals for your teams”.