This book club was about scaling agility, and we had a fantastic special guest joining us: Bas Vodde. Bas co-created Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) with Craig Larman. LeSS is one of the earliest and most popular Agile scaling approaches, and my go-to recommendation for organizations looking to scale Agile. Bas and Craig’s book, Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, is well worth reading.

Reading:
📖 Scaling Agility

🎙 Discussion prompts:

• The book discusses scaling organizational capability as well as scaling product teams. How have you seen organizations approach scaling their capability (or not)? How did it turn out?

• Team-level coaching capabililty is an important part of scaling agility. If you could do anything, how would you scale out coaching capability?

• The book describes two approaches to scaling product teams: vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of each approach?

• Share some stories about scaling product teams. What worked well, and what didn’t?

About the Book Club

From October 2021 to August 2022, I hosted a call-in talk show based on the second edition of The Art of Agile Development. The series used the book as a jumping-off point for wide-ranging discussions about Agile ideas and practices, and had a star-studded guest list.

For an archive of past sessions, visit the book club index. For more about the book, visit the Art of Agile Development home page.