You know the story. A product manager, a designer, and a brilliant tech lead start improving things. It begins small. Maybe they streamline refinement, tighten up story flow, or pull in delivery metrics to guide roadmap decisions. But it works. The team feels empowered. Flow improves. The new workflow is clicking.
Across the organization, other product areas are doing the same. One group builds a new ritual for grooming. Another experiments with a more responsive intake process. A third refines a delivery cadence anchored by a trusted engineer.
And yet, over time, something feels off.
Not because the changes aren’t working. But because they feel disconnected.
Sometimes, agile at scale gets harder than it needs to be not due to lack of initiative, but because so much improvement happens in parallel, and without a shared rhythm.
The Big Band Problem
Picture Beyonce on stage at Coachella, with dozens of musicians on stage. The rhythm section locks in a rumbling groove, lost in their own beats. The horn section improvise something brilliant, drowning out most of the other players. The backup singers bring in a powerful chorus, but it’s from the wrong part of the song. Everyone is skilled. The parts are strong. But together? It starts to sound like a bad mashup that no one asked for.
That’s what Agile at scale can look like when smart improvement happen in isolation at the system level. Efforts that work brilliantly in one pillar or product area don’t translate across. Instead of accelerating transformation, we introduce drag without realizing it.
The Subtle Costs of Disconnected Change
- Tool Fragmentation: One area uses Monday. Another adopts Jira Advanced Roadmaps. Integration stalls.
- Process Divergence: Definition of Ready, delivery cadences, or refinement rituals begin to differ significantly.
- Context Switching for Shared Roles: Anyone working across pillars spends more time relearning than contributing.
- Lost Leverage: Excellent ideas don’t spread because there’s no natural path for them to scale.
Why This Pattern Emerges
- It’s natural to optimize locally first
- Product areas respond to their unique pressures and people
- Feedback loops often stay within the team or domain
- There’s not always a place to connect the dots between improvement efforts
None of this is unusual. In fact, it’s a positive sign that you’ve got talented people that are growing in their roles. But growth creates complexity. And without a bit of shared structure, even good complexity can slow us down.
The Fix: Build a Change Backbone
If you want harmony, you need more than talented players. You need someone listening to the whole song.
1. Create a Light Coordination Layer
A rotating group of reps from product, engineering, design, and coaching can act as connectors. Their goal isn’t to govern change; it’s to connect it. Share what’s working. Surface what’s overlapping. Make patterns visible.
2. Track Local Improvements Transparently
Use a shared space or board. Not to manage work, but to make exploration visible. This allows others to build on or adapt experiments early.
3. Establish Cross-Area Feedback Loops
Not every insight needs to stay in one area. Host showcases, run “retro-of-retros,” or open up working sessions across pillars. Let lessons travel.
4. Align on Principles, Not Prescriptions
Resist the urge to standardize everything. Instead, agree on shared values around delivery, backlog health, or technical quality. Let each group tune their approach.
5. Empower Translators
Some folks naturally bridge domains. Encourage product leaders, tech leads, and coaches to actively cross-pollinate. Change scales best through people, not documents.
Agile at scale doesn’t get stuck because people aren’t trying. It gets stuck when we don’t share what we’re learning.
Sometimes, all it takes is a shared rhythm.
Tune your instruments. Listen to each other. And let the song grow.
