Virtually every Team in their first Sprint is confronted with the problem of single-specialization causing work imbalance. What happens? The Product Owner orders the Product Backlog to maximize value. But when the team members are specialized in a single dimension - such as QA, Java development, front-end development - some team members regularly will find themselves with no work related to their area of specialization. Single-specialization inevitably causes work imbalance.

(Originally published by Lv Yi on June 23, 2019)

(Originally published by Lv Yi on June 21, 2019)

(Originally published by Lv Yi on June 12, 2019)

In this article, we shall look at the structure of functional and component teams, explore the dynamics around their backlogs, analyze its impact on agility, and find the lever to optimize for agility.

A functional team is responsible for functional work such as analysis, design, implementation, and testing. Component team is responsible for the implementation of various technical components, such as component A, B and C. Each team has its own work and priority, thus, its own backlog. For overall value delivery, it means that the required work is in multiple backlogs which are dependent on one another.

(Originally published by Lv Yi on June 8, 2019)

This is the first article in a series about “number of backlogs and multi-learning”. It introduces three common team structures in product development organizations.