Scaling Agile

Scaling and Common Scaling Challenges

Sometimes a product is too complex for a single team to handle. When this happens, there are two natural ways to scale:

• Adding more people to the existing team
• Adding more teams

However, simply doing either of these introduces new complexity of its own. More people and more teams mean more communication overhead, higher collaboration costs, and an increased risk of misalignment. Among the many challenges that arise, two are particularly critical:

• How do we produce a useful, integrated increment? With multiple teams working in parallel, ensuring their work fits together into a coherent, shippable product is non-trivial.
• How do we reduce cross-team dependencies? Dependencies between teams slow delivery, create bottlenecks, and undermine the autonomy that makes Agile effective in the first place.

These two challenges are at the heart of why scaling frameworks exist.

Common Scaling Solutions

Several frameworks have emerged to address these challenges. The three most widely adopted are SAFe, LeSS, and Nexus.

• SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) is the most comprehensive and prescriptive of the three. It organizes teams into Agile Release Trains working in fixed program increments, providing strong enterprise-wide alignment and governance. However, this comes at the cost of added bureaucracy and reduced team autonomy. It is best suited for large enterprises undergoing broad Agile transformation.
• LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) takes the opposite philosophy, focusing on simplicity and “descaling” rather than adding structure. It keeps additions to Scrum minimal, using a single Product Owner and a single Product Backlog shared across teams. It works best with mature, self-organizing Scrum teams.
• Nexus, developed by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber, adds just enough structure — most notably the Nexus Integration Team — to coordinate three to nine Scrum teams working on a single product, while staying close to Scrum’s original simplicity.