Add it to the pile.
Do you know that feeling? When you’re looking at your to-do list, trying to decide where to start. Your eye catches a specific item, but you don’t really feel like doing that one right now. You decide there’s still plenty of time to do it later and put it aside. Besides, there are several urgent items on the list which can be completed much more efficiently. So you decide to complete these first.
To speed up development we decided to work with multiple teams on one of our bigger e-commerce platform projects. We usually work with one team on an Epic or project, so this was a first for us. The switch brought up a lot of questions like; how do we deal with a combined backlog? And how do we keep the teams aligned?
Teams and PO’s often have difficulties with prioritizing their user stories, epics or themes. It is not easy to define clearly what determines a specific priority. It depends on the content matter.
Two years ago there were 38 of us in the IT development department of Coolblue. As a company we grew very fast and our backlogs were long and expanding. We had to do something about that and we decided that we wanted to hire 100 more developers. And we did!
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Coolblue is a fast growing company and our IT department is everything but an exception. The web-platform community has almost doubled in size last year. Here we describe how our teams are structured in order to cope with frequent composition changes.
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