Abstract:

Many agile adoptions stop at the boundaries of R&D. Teams become “agile,” yet customer service, operations, and product development remain disconnected — creating delays, handoffs, and blind spots exactly where fast feedback and learning would matter most.
In this talk, we share a real-world case involving four teams working on a cross-industry software platform for energy, climate, and environmental management.

The platform helps companies track, analyze, and optimize energy consumption, resource usage, and carbon footprint — a domain where reliability, transparency, and fast feedback are critical.
Rather than optimizing R&D in isolation, we deliberately redesigned multiple teams to cover the entire customer journey, integrating product development, customer service, and operations into a single product group.

This restructuring helped break down long-standing knowledge silos, shortened feedback cycles, and created a shared understanding of systemic constraints that had previously remained invisible.
A key enabler was the introduction of one shared Product Backlog to manage both planned product work and unplanned, ad-hoc requests. This increased transparency, clarified priorities across teams, and enabled explicit trade-offs — resulting in significantly improved predictability of customer updates.
Along the way, we faced and addressed very practical challenges: how to streamline Sprint events across teams, enable effective inter-team collaboration, improve Product Backlog management, and handle the constant tension between feature development, legacy code, technical debt, and quality issues.
Rather than presenting a polished success story, this session focuses on how we got there, what did not work initially, and which ongoing experiments continue to shape the product group today.

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