Hi! I’m Julie Carter, and I want to share my revelation on scaling agile principles to address multi-team dependencies in global product development.

As a Scrum master at an enterprise software company, I managed complex features that required seamless coordination between offshore and US development teams. After attending the Certified Agile Scaling Practitioner (CASP) course, I can confidently say that scaling agile principles I learned in Evolve Agility’s workshop can transform challenges faced by many distributed teams.

Why simple features became orchestration challenges?

My team structure was globally distributed, with

• Offshore frontend and backend developers, and QA
• US-based backend developers, software architect, and
• European UX/UI designer.

Although the team was cross-functional, we were globally distributed, which created dependencies within it. These regularly impacted sprint commitments and delivery timelines throughout the year.

Time zone coordination created persistent bottlenecks and challenges. Critical design decisions from our European designer couldn’t reach the offshore frontend team until the next day. Backend integration between offshore and US teams required constant synchronization, leading to merge conflicts and code rework. QA discovered integration issues requiring fixes across multiple time zones. Simple features became orchestration challenges, with teams working efficiently in isolation while overall value delivery stalled.

In the CASP course, we were presented with different case scenarios in which we had to apply our learnings to problem-solve. The “Discrete Asks” case scenario closely mirrored the workplace challenges I was encountering-multiple teams, depending on components from others, before delivering customer value.

We applied Lean Thinking lenses to identify various types of waste. In Lean thinking, waste is a non-value-added activity. For my situation, I identified the following non-value-added activities:

• Waiting for cross-time-zone clarification
• Features developed but not fully integrated or merged due to dependencies
• Manual coordination efforts add significant overhead.

Scaling Agile principles to put into practice

The CASP workshop helped me to understand that the principle of “enabling constraints and loose couplings” would have transformed our approach. Instead of tight handoffs between specialized teams, we could have established clear API specifications upfront, allowing independent parallel development. Teams could have worked against agreed contracts, reducing integration surprises.

Additionally, the practice of holding cross-functional collaborative design workshops would have replaced our siloed approach. Rather than isolated design handoffs that later revealed backend constraints, joint design sessions would have surfaced integration concerns early and created shared understanding for stakeholders across time zones.

The practice of Value stream mapping would also have revealed our coordination overhead costs. Adopting the principle of “visualizing the complete flow from feature conception to customer delivery” would have helped identify bottlenecks that are invisible when teams focus solely on specialized deliverables. Tracking items along the value stream would have increased visibility and driven conversations about restructuring responsibilities to optimize end-to-end flow rather than individual team efficiency.

Finally, the concept of enabling constraints “pull, timebox, increment” could have replaced push-based coordination efforts, resulting in a sustainable rhythm. Instead of coordinating complex multi-team features across multiple sprints, we could timebox smaller, customer-valuable increments that individual teams would deliver independently.

Key Takeaways

Reflecting on my learning experience through the workshop’s principles to practices approach revealed to me that our scaling challenges weren’t always technical—they were organizational design problems. We had optimized for specialized efficiency rather than collaborative effectiveness. Redefining our challenges as organization design challenges will deliver enormous benefits for us in terms of effectiveness and efficiency going forward. Scaling agile maxims and systematic approaches learned in a collaborative learning environment helped me to identify patterns for implementing sustainable solutions that respect distributed development realities while dramatically improving coordination on customer value delivery.

For Scrum Masters facing similar challenges, the course offers concrete tools to diagnose organizational anti-patterns and design for better team interactions and experiences. The key insight is moving from managing dependencies to designing systems that minimize them.

The transition from traditional scaling to Agile Scaling principles requires recognizing that global product development success depends more on organizational design than on technical capability alone.