As an experienced Scrum Master with PSM certification and an Agile Coach, I facilitate teams’ progress toward common goals and focus on improving dynamics and performance. Throughout the years of my professional work, I have been responsible for supporting and enforcing the Scrum process and other rules that the team has agreed on.

Agnieszka Pawlicka

If your entire business module stands on software development, sooner or later, you will get to the point where **you need to scale up your software development team**. Either your customer base starts growing faster, or the stakeholders have new goals that they want to implement the earliest, in both cases, the scaling of your business is essential.

If you have already aligned the foundation by creating best practices and gathering the competent people to develop software, things will work smoothly. When you start to scale up to a larger team, you will notice that processes and practices that worked well for a small number of people no longer work or work in a worse manner at a larger scale.

So, what can you do to **augment your existing development team**? Below you will find some tips to help you as a manager, leader, or product owner to grow your business with large-scale software development teams successfully.

## Five Tips to Scale Software Development Teams Successfully

These five best tips will help product managers to grow and build products with large-scale software dev squads successfully. Let’s start:

### Stay Agile

The adjective of **‘Agile**’ is used for adaptability when it comes to referring to a group. The first thing you need to scale your software development team is the **self-organization** of all team members. Different members play an essential role in the completion of any product or project such as developers, designers, QA officers, etc. [Agile teams](https://selleo.com/blog/how-to-build-high-performance-agile-teams) are cross-functional teams who share a sense of responsibility for the end product.

If you are trying to scale your business using traditional methods, it will create silos and slow down productivity. Whereas, an **agile methodology** makes it easier for companies to respond to the challenges of scalability. Previously, it was considered by business experts that agile methods could only be implemented for a small scale project. However, the perception has completely changed now.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/5000x5000/136bcd17b1/42.jpg)

When it comes to defining an agile team, it is a collaborative effort to meet the end-goals. For example, by determining the priority of features, the team can understand the most important parts of a project that can deliver value. Using an agile approach, a  group of software developers can deliver incrementally to a set timescale and cost, which means that a project can be released quicker and start **generating ROI**.

By working collaboratively, different company employees can gather to deliver the initial scope of work, i.e. **MVP (Minimum Viable Product)**, quicker than expected.

### Build a Strong Distributed Development Team

If you hire the wrong people for the job, you will never be able to scale your company successfully. As mentioned earlier, agile teams can only work when they **perform tasks collaboratively**. Finding the right talent in this market is not an easy job. The competition among businesses has made it challenging to offer above-average salaries and benefits. However, help is at hand, and the distributed software team could provide the answer.

A distributed team allows you to augment your existing resources from generalist to specialist. It also provides you access to a pool of global talent with more favorable salary expectations, which leads to ROI and productivity.

Now comes the hard part – managing a distributed team is highly challenging. As a business, you will be responsible for providing the necessary infrastructure and technology to your remote employees. Rather than hiring employees or freelancers, most companies prefer to opt for another option, **‘Outsourcing.’**

<Baner name={scrum-master} />

### Outsource Your Development Team

Hiring an employee takes a lot of effort, expense, and commitment. If you hire an employee, you need to give them benefits like medical, yearly bonuses, etc. Similarly, if you hire a freelancer, you cannot expect their full dedication towards only your project as they might be engaged in many other projects. The middle ground where you won’t need to put a lot of effort and money, but you will get **complete dedication is outsourcing**. Tasks that are excessive and burdening your existing team can be outsourced.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/6250x4000/b2c786bb91/6001.jpg)

Outsourcing is a great option when building a distributed team due to a lack of internal skills or being overloaded with projects. Outsourcing [has many benefits](https://selleo.com/blog/4-reasons-why-you-should-consider-outsourcing-saas-development), such as no fixed cost; you will only pay for the work you will receive for a dedicated project. Moreover, outsourcing **let you scale up and down** (if needed) fast depending on your development requirements with no worry of letting people go when the project is completed or recruiting in hurry resources when the project is expanding.

### Select the Right Processes and Technology

Managing a distributed group of people requires **open communication** and the **right technology** that fits the job. If you are implementing an agile approach, then keeping open communication with the right tools such as video conferencing and project management is necessary. All the tasks that can be automated should be automated. The **automation of tasks** will help the teams put their effort into high-impact work rather than mundane tasks.

If you are outsourcing some of the tasks, then your outsourcing contractor should provide the disparate developers with everything they need to do the job. You have to make sure that your in-house team is in sync with the outsource employees and have access to everything they require to do their job.

At the time, it becomes difficult to know what technology is the right one and should be invested in and when it is best to do so. Another great option is to **lease the technological devices and tools**, rather them buying them outright. With this option in your hand, you will get the equipment you need to succeed today, without worrying about financing the investment upfront. Pay a monthly cost per user per device.

When it comes to scaling your dev team, you need to align the strategy with your current business needs while preparing for future growth. **The quicker your business adapts to the changes, the more agile your development team will become.**

### Inspect and Adapt

In any development project, you must be ready to **accept that change will occur**. A successful business always inspects the change and adopts a strategy to cater to that change by allocating budget, resources, and time. Create best practices and distribute them among all members or distributed teams. The **more proactively** you work to inspect the change, the **more adaptable** your business will become. The proactive approach also helps to identify dependencies across teams to spot potential risks and mitigate them. A company should adopt [scrum ceremonies](https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/guide-to-scrum-ceremonies) based on each team’s needs - choose the best approach which fits the scaled team. Use retrospectives as an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness and productivity of your company’s ROI.

Another recommended practice for business is to conduct [daily meetings](https://selleo.com/blog/how-to-run-remote-daily-scum-meeting-effectively) to discuss how to improve communication and collaboration among the members and distributed teams. Monitoring each employee’s performance and the entire group as a whole is **critical for the growth** of your software development business. Monitor if the teams can work better together to understand and execute the requirements. If you find discrepancies, plan a strategy to address them.

## Conclusion

The tips above are meant to offer managers and team leaders a set of actions to set up a successful development team from the beginning and scale up the existing resources.

It is essential to **implement [agile practices](https://selleo.com/blog/agile-software-development-process-everything-you-need-to-know)** and **put technology and proces**s in place to identify collaboration across members and their dependencies. Bring the right people, either an in-house or outsourced development team, to ensure that best practices and strong partnership are in place to guarantee that there is a **shared understanding of the goal to be achieved.**

When it comes to scaling your software development team, you need a **strategy** that aligns with your **current business needs**. You need to build the alignment around shared goals using an incremental approach by delivering the value.

It is worth noting that each engagement and collaboration is unique, and the most important way to succeed with scaling your business is to stay agile and empower teams to grow continuously.

With [Selleo](https://selleo.com/contact) by your side, **augmenting your existing development resource is simple**. We can guide you on how to scale your software development team successfully.

If your entire business module stands on software development, sooner or later, you will get to the point where you need to scale up your software development team.Read this article to find out how to scale your software development team successfully.

How To Scale Software Development Teams Successfully

COVID-19 definitely has created an extreme situation for many companies where most of their employees suddenly were required to work from home. The same situation happened at our offices at Selleo and due to the coronavirus epidemics, **we needed to adapt to the new conditions** still keeping our teams agile.

The COVID-19 crisis disturbed our best practices, cooperating with agile and scrum which have worked well so far. However, remote work is just another challenge for our agility, yet the definition of **Agile is “being able to adapt to a rapidly changing environment”.**

After a couple of months of working fully remotely with our teams, I can assure that being truly agile is possible in distributed teams. **Neither Scrum Guide nor Agile Manifesto forbids remote setups**, yet many scrum followers insist on having colocated teams.

The question is **how to create a [remote environment](https://blog.trello.com/long-distance-leadership) that is collaborative, efficient and empowers** the team members to do their best work. The agile framework definitely helps teams to accomplish that goal. As a result of delivering the work in small increments, the team has the power of adaptability and flexibility to their processes and plans.

However, if you have your teams distributed, either you wish so or you were forced to due to external conditions, in this article you can find some tips on how to keep your remote teams agile.

## Regular Rhythm of Meetings

If you want your team to succeed in adopting agile practices while working remotely and increasing their efficiency, meetings are a must. A regular meeting cadence helps to make sure that everyone is **on the same page** and in general enables collaboration when people are distributed.

The challenge is how to make the most out of the meetings with your remote team. Here are a few tips on how to improve the quality of your remote meetings.

### 1. Eliminate any technical issues

Before you start your first remote sprint and the meeting that goes along with the event, check if all of your **team members have the right tools and resources** in place. Without the right technology, your meetings become less effective and more time-consuming. It is good to do a dry run with your team and check everything you will need during your meetings, like video conferences with screen sharing, sound quality and so on. If you come up across any issues, make sure to find a solution to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

When people change their working environment and for example, start to work from home, at the very beginning, they need to set up their audio and video tools properly in order to collaborate efficiently with the rest of the team. Sometimes it is necessary to buy a new microphone or headset for voice/video calls since it is crucial that everyone can hear each other without any technical issues.

Also, if you find your current video conferencing tool is not working properly, e.g. freezes every time you host a meeting, you will need to check another tool and onboard everyone before the next meeting.

Any problems with communication due to technical issues impact the team’s productivity, so it is important to work them out.

### 2. Use stand-ups to connect with your team

Stand-ups or daily scrums are a core component of the agile framework and work perfectly in a remote setup owing that they are an easy meeting structure. **Stand-up is a short meeting, timeboxed to 15 minutes** when the team members share status updates on their progress and what tasks they are working on currently. The meeting helps to keep the team updated but also to identify any impediments and find solutions for them.

During the remote work, this meeting is really powerful because it is not only the check-in for your team to keep everyone in the loop but first of all, it is a great way to create a sense of connection and collaboration.

It is important to figure out with the team the best time for a daily scrum to occur and hold the stand-ups at the same time every day.

From our experience at Selleo, we recommend holding a daily scrum at the start of the day so that everyone has a clear idea of what the day holds. You can think the stand-up as a morning check-in for your team and energise them for the whole day.

However, if you have your team working in different time zones, it is a good option to choose an hour when **the majority of your team is starting their day**. This way, the team members can get aligned on the most important tasks before they start.

<Baner name={scrum-master} />

### 3. Eliminate unnecessary meetings and keep timeboxes

It will be hard for your team to find enough time to deal with their tasks efficiently and productively if their schedule is fully packed with meetings, especially when some of them are unnecessary.

As mentioned before, meetings are important while working remotely, but remember not to host meetings just for the sake of it. It is best to have only the necessary meetings and run them efficiently, keeping time boxes and having the goal of meeting in mind.

The Scrum framework has defined ceremonies dedicated to particular goals and they are timeboxed to achieve these goals. The essential scrum meetings are **Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-up, Sprint Review and Retrospective**. In addition, the team may need a backlog refinement session during the Sprint to ensure the quality of users stories and prioritize the features list.

All these events, when done properly, should be sufficient to help with achieving the Sprint goals so there is no need to host any other all-hands meeting.

In Selleo, each team has those events scheduled upfront, so that everyone involved could participate and be prepared for the meeting.

It is crucial that the meeting begins and ends on time, so you need to stick to your schedule no matter who is there to attend the meeting. Waiting for the team members to join causes you to lose precious time and patience of those who joined on time. This particular Scrum meeting practice will also invoke a sense of punctuality in your team members the next time they join because it will be clear for everyone that meetings will always begin and end according to the schedule.

## Build a Distributed Team Culture

This may probably be the most challenging part of working remotely and also the most important. The organizational culture is a crucial part of the workplace and it can be easily lost when teams are suddenly distributed.

In Selleo, we have our playbook with permission-to-play values and set of behaviours: we are **“kindergarten players”** (positive, collaborative, helpful) and we work according to these values on a daily basis. These values definitely help while working remotely and it is important to keep them in mind.

### 1. Being positive and empathic

It is important to understand that some people who never worked remotely before can have problems to quickly adjust to the new situation. For them, changing the work environment is a total disruption of their work practices and at the very beginning can cause problems with efficiency and productivity.

Team members that are aware of one another’s circumstances collaborate more effectively so it is important to create **an atmosphere of openness and empathy**. Consider that everyone’s working environment may be different and talk about various perspectives openly. Also during meeting create a positive and engaging atmosphere in order to keep your team in connection.

### 2. Being helpful

In a remote environment, this value has another purpose. Not only being helpful in solving problems, removing impediments, sharing knowledge, but also in building self-reliance, both as individuals and as a team.

Some people can have problems with building self-regulation mechanisms when working environment changes. The daily routine from the office is being disrupted and new working conditions need to be setup. It is important to help with adapting to the changes they encounter.

### 3. Being collaborative

In order to build effective collaboration with your remote team members, it is really important to create an environment of trust and transparency. We need transparency between the development team and a customer to make sure we are building the thing expected. Also, we need openness inside the team to make sure we build it the right way.

**Frequent communication, open and frank question** between team members help to avoid any misunderstandings and to get things done faster. Focus on the common goal bring all the team members together and increases their engagement and collaboration.

## Continuous Improvement

Using agile practices to better support and collaborate with your remote team is a learning process. And if you want the process to be successful, **always strive for better results**. Look back on what was working well, what was not working and what needs to be improved.

Scrum has an event solely dedicated for this purpose, Sprint retrospective meeting, when the team is reviewing what went right and wrong during a Sprint in regards to the **process, tools, communication** and so on. The meeting brings a great opportunity for the entire team to reflect back on the work and what improvements are needed to be made.

In Selleo, we look back at our **track record and learn continuously**. We are aware that mastering the skill of Scrum meetings, especially those hosting remotely, requires practice and improvement so we are consistently looking at what’s working, what’s not working, and what needs to change. Compare the results with the original goals and be aware of all the changes that are occurring around your team.

In the end, the agile framework is effective for a variety of team structures. But from our experience, we can ensure that it is **especially effective for remote teams** for the reason that it allows to quickly identify what is working well and what needs to be improved. Owing to the inspect and adapt approach, you can make changes immediately which is especially important in maintaining efficiency in distributed teams.

Neither Scrum Guide nor Agile Manifesto forbids remote setups, yet many scrum followers insist on having colocated teams.  The question is how to create a remote environment that is collaborative, efficient and empowers the team members to do their best work.

How To Keep Your Remote Teams Agile During Crisis?

## 5 Key Steps to Run Remote Daily Scrum Meeting Effectively

One of the pillars of agile methodology is a team collocation. It has been proven that teams that work together in the same office report higher effectiveness and better collaboration. **At Selleo we are aware of that fact and for years have been focused on building collocated agile teams**.

However, sometimes a situation independent from us forces us to work remotely. At this moment it is the coronavirus epidemics which disturbed our best practices which have worked well so far.

Working remotely for some time now we confirm that communication is the key aspect for good and effective collaboration. In this article, you can find some key steps on how to run daily scrum, one of the most important meetings, remotely in an effective way. First of all, let us remind what it is all about.

## What is a daily scrum?

A daily scrum meeting or a daily stand-up is a special 15 minute event that helps [scrum teams](https://selleo.com/blog/how-to-build-high-performance-agile-teams) to be **more productive and efficient**. Scrum master is responsible for arranging the meeting so it is held every day at the same time and place. It is also important to keep the timebox, that is why the core idea of the meeting was to run it standing up - just because it helps to keep it short.

## What is the purpose of a daily scrum?

The main idea of the meeting is to spend the dedicated 15 minutes productively by sharing what **we have achieved so far and what we plan to do**. During the meeting, each team member summarizes what he/she did the previous day, what will be done today, and what obstacles does he/she has to overcome.

The meeting’s goal is to assist the product owner and the scrum team to communicate and deliver a better product.

From our experience, we are convinced that daily scrum is a really important event in the agile approach and can be extremely helpful when run efficiently.

Arranging a **15-minutes meeting** is not a unique talent, but the key is to prepare and run a scrum meeting effectively, especially when it is done remotely.

Here we put together some important steps that should be used to run a daily scrum with a remote team to focus your team’s attention and provide the most value for everyone involved.

<Baner name={scrum-master} />

### 1. Figure out the best time daily scrum occurs

The first step in organizing an effective scrum meeting remotely is figuring out the logistics. It is important to **hold your daily scrum at the same time** - in such a way you can really strengthen its ritual power.

From our experience at Selleo, we recommend holding a daily scrum at the start of the day so that everyone has a clear idea of what the day holds. However, if you have your team working in different time zones, it is a good option to choose an hour when the majority of your team is starting their day. This way, team members can get aligned on the most important tasks before they start working.

In fact, the most important is that the hour you pick for the meeting should **suit best all the team members**. In such a case you can be certain that they will participate in the meeting more willingly and the meeting will be effective.

### 2. Make sure everyone involved participates

Choosing the best time for everyone is also important for them just to participate in the meeting. Finally, the success of any stand-up meeting depends on **team members’ participation**. If you can’t get people to be engaged in the meeting, most of the value which scrum meeting brings is lost.
At Selleo we are aware that the main goal of daily scrum meeting is to **keep everyone involved** in the project up to date and engaged. This short meeting has really big power when it comes to keeping everyone in the loop.

If participation from your team is lacking, it is important to understand what is the reason behind it. Are time zone challenges the issue? Are there any misunderstandings due to poor audio connection? Maybe schedules don’t fit everyone?

The power of scrum methodology is the **inspect and adapt approach** which you can do during every scrum event. But if you would like to discuss the issue more deeply, please use the retrospective meeting to get insights from the team why the participation is lacking.

### 3. Have a solid audio / video setup

Sometimes the best meeting can be ruined by poor communication related to wrong audio / video setup.

For remote teams, it is absolutely critical for an **effective stand-up meeting to have a solid A/V configuration**. If you can’t hear or understand your teammates well, you can lose the important details which can have an impact on your later work. It also really frustrating when you spent your meeting time troubleshooting and in fact wasting everyone’s time.

There is a lot of tools which enable you to run a remote meeting, both with audio and video capabilities, but you should always make sure that it works for all team members and **everyone can hear and see one another**.

### 4. Keep it short

A stand-up meeting, no matter if you have one week sprint or one month, should always take no longer than 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter if it is held in-person or online. It is important to keep the timeboxing because the goal of the meeting is to synchronize with the team members **instead of running long discussions**. If the daily scrum runs longer than 15 minutes, you need to take a closer look at the root cause and address it. Please check if your team is well prepared for the meeting, if they update the rest in a **clear manner and cut the long discussions**. You should also check if your team is not too large. In scrum, an effective team should consist of no more than **9 members**.

If something comes up during the scrum meetings, it should be discussed during the separate meeting among people directly involved in that issue. The daily scrum is not the time to dive deep into the planning or technical details of software development. You should only indicate the issue and **plan the separate meeting** for that, this is sometimes called a sidebar or parking lot. At Selleo, to keep things moving along, scrum master dedicated to the team facilitates the meeting and in such cases keeps an eye on the duration of the meeting and cuts long discussions immediately.

### 5. Use a standard set of questions

To help keep the scrum meeting both short and effective, you can always use standard questions which are included in the **scrum guide**. Regardless of whether your team is co-located or working remotely, the best scrum meeting consists of team members answering the consistent questions. This helps them prepare as they know in advance what information they are expected to share during the meeting. Those questions are as follows:

#### *What did I do yesterday?*

This easy question help team members share **what they accomplished** since the previous scrum meeting. It is important that updates focus on deliverables allowing the entire team to understand what work has been done. The team member should also emphasize how the work is done, which helps the team get closer to the sprint goal.

#### *What are my plans for today?*

This question is focused on the **plan for the upcoming day** until the next scrum meeting will be held. Team members should say what they are going to do to help the whole team understand which tasks remain. When answering the question, it is also important to keep the goal of the sprint in mind, so that the team members don’t go off the track.

#### *Are there any obstacles?*

This question is probably the most critical one. If something is **blocking the progress, you should know it asap**. Team members should share anything that blocks them from getting the job to be done. Unresolved impediments can be extremely harmful to your team’s velocity and overall project success.

But again, it is important to answer these questions in a timely manner and clear for all team members. People should avoid technical details, not focus on the implementation of the task, but only share the status of their work. As mentioned earlier, deeper discussions should be run during a separate meeting with the people involved.

## Closing thoughts

While no one knows how long the COVID-19 epidemics will last, it seems that many of us will be working remotely for at least a couple of weeks. **The daily scrum is a valuable time that should be treated as a collaborative effort for the whole team to keep remote teams functioning effectively.**

Try not to think about the scrum meeting as strict rules but more as a way to maximize productivity. Then you will see that it is an effective tool for your development team, especially when they are distributed.

Are you looking for an **experienced scrum master** to facilitate your meetings? Or a **fully-fledged team** of development specialists to build your next product? [Meet Selleo engineers](https://selleo.com/software-development-team/ecommerce#agnieszka-pawlicka)!

One of the pillars of agile methodology is a team collocation. It has been proven that teams that work together in the same office report higher effectiveness and better collaboration.

How to Run Remote Daily Scrum Meeting Effectively?

A “team” in the Agile sense is a small group of people, who work together on a project, nearly all of them on a full-time basis. A team should possess all the skills necessary to get the job done and entails shared accountability.

However, imagine passionates who **are highly motivated** and **engaged as a team**, who contribute directly towards achieving your business goals by **delivering exceptional digital products.**

What makes them do so? What are the secrets of **great teams**?

Below you can find **six key elements which I consider as valid and crucial for setting-up solid Agile teams**. We always keep them in the back of our mind when building and leading our Agile teams at Selleo and we recommend them to consider while setting up your own team.

### 1. Build upon a solid foundation

Incorporating **common values** in Agile teams is crucial to create a culture of work that is collaborative in the first place. It forms a solid foundation that brings together all team members and fosters integration. Collaboration simply means to work together to accomplish a task. Agile methodologies stress the benefits of working with cross-functional teams rather than working in functional silos. It promotes frequent communication and cooperation between team members which helps to avoid any misunderstandings and to get things done faster.

From our experience, team bondings and its dynamics get better with time and people are more productive when they trust each other and enjoy working together. It also takes time to understand how individual team member’s skills complement the skills of another peer.  At Selleo, we promote the way of **self-organising and self-managing** client-focused team, which is possible due to the flat and network structure of the company. Teams at Selleo are collocated in the office so they can easily integrate with each other not only through formal and scheduled meetings but also through small chitchats, informal discussions or common afterwork activities. Establishing a strong team is not about sending your team members to team building events and expecting greater results from the team. High-performing teams take some time to build so try to keep your teams together.

<ReadMore> Read also: [Agile Software Development Process – Everything You Need to Know](https://selleo.com/blog/agile-software-development-process-everything-you-need-to-know) </ReadMore>

### 2. Establish strong engineering practices

Beyond keeping the team together, it's really important to build the sequence of the best engineering practices like code reviews, continuous integration and deployment, sharing the codebase between all the software developers and a single coding standard to which all the programmers adhere. At Selleo, we have implemented **high-quality engineering practices**, like automated tests, builds and deployments as well as daily practices in code review and quality assurance of software development in order to increase the confidence of the team and the quality of the service they deliver. A better quality of code and lack of technical debt are achieved by the regular, rigorous refactoring during software development. High-performing agile teams are aware that strong engineering fundamentals are crucial for delivering great digital products.

### 3. Ensure continuous mentoring

In order to support individual team member’s development, there is a huge need for creating an environment where the peers can learn from each other. **Pair-programming sessions, TILs, code reviews, and feedback** - these are some of the instruments we use at Selleo on a daily basis as encouragement to share the knowledge across the teams. Mentoring is not just an activity for a junior member to learn from seniors. Everyone from the team can learn from each other in order to unlock their power as a whole to tackle diverse and sophisticated work.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/800x533/c48e4b07e1/teams.jpg)

When the team members work well together and have good relationships they also use informal discussions as a common way of sharing knowledge. They are motivated to share experience across the team because they have a common goal -  to deliver their work with the highest quality.

At Selleo. we love to **reward people who never stop learning**, never stop growing and never stop helping others to grow. We do our best to deliver to people everything they need to make them grow continuously, and we are aware that being helpful and sharing knowledge with the colleagues are the values which high-performing teams are equipped with. You can also help your teams by creating efficient and successful mechanisms for knowledge sharing across and beyond the team with management and various specialists.

<Baner name={scrum-master} />

### 4. Create a cross-functional team

High-performing Agile teams comprise individuals with a broad set of skills that are necessary to effectively accomplish the work from their backlog. Team members must be **open and highly motivated** and the team must have both the authority and the accountability to achieve the goals they have been given. Typical cross-functional team at Selleo can do a lot of different stuff because it includes software engineers who have expertise both on the back-end and/or front-end of the software product. It also may include e.g. designers, testers and user experience (UX) specialists, if those activities are necessary to get the work done as a team.  
The key aspect here is that the high-performance team should be able to **deliver the results of their work by combining their respective skills and talents**.

### 5. Communicate the big picture and goal

Team members work better when they know how their work is aligned with the overall goal and when it contributes to the bigger picture. It is not about picking up stories from the backlog without understanding what value it brings to the entire vision. This approach is not effective. It is important to invest time in communicating the bigger picture, the current priorities and goals to the team in order to **increase engagement and ownership**.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/800x533/230160ae0b/goals.jpg)

At Selleo we work according to the **Scrum and Agile methodology** and we always encourage the Product Owners to share their vision and goals to the Development Team at each stage of the project. We insist on communicating the vision early and often - this communication should start from the kickoff meeting and continue throughout the entire development cycle.  Common goals are important not only because they develop creativity and innovation but because they bring people together and encourage them to communicate problems and results. There is such a notion of ‘feature teams’ in Agile, where a team owns a particular area of the software application, but with a better understanding of the overall goal, they feel responsible for the project as a whole.

### 6. Empower the team with decision-making

In order for the Agile team to work effectively, the team members should be **empowered to make their own decisions**. As mentioned before they need to be presented with the bigger picture in order to set up their own goals in alignment with the overall goal. The team needs to understand what work is to be done but they are given the freedom to find their own solutions and ways of working. At Selleo, Agile teams work according to the best practices and when they have a feeling of total ownership, which again is possible due to flat and network structure, it creates much better results. Freedom in decision-making for the Agile teams creates a culture of creativity and an environment which promotes challenging tasks constructively.

## Closing thoughts

In essence, those six elements are crucial while setting-up the Agile teams, however, it takes some time and effort to build a high-performing team with strong fundamentals and broad set of skills.

We can observe our customers’ satisfaction growing from the cooperation with our Agile teams. We can ensure that, when the team is mature, has strong practices both on collaboration and engineering, and in addition is established with the freedom of decision-making and ownership it delivers much **better value to customer experience and improves overall service and product quality**.

After all, what makes a good team great is the ability to **focus on the common goal** which brings all the team members together and increases their engagement, interactions and communication.

It is also essential to instil positivity in team members and encourage them to share their knowledge and thoughts across the team. These are the fuels of productivity which help the team grow continuously.

Imagine passionates who are highly motivated and engaged as a team, who contribute directly towards achieving your business goals by delivering exceptional digital products. What makes them do so? What are the secrets of great teams? 

Agnieszka Pawlicka

Blog posts that I worked on

How To Scale Software Development Teams Successfully

How To Keep Your Remote Teams Agile During Crisis?

How to Run Remote Daily Scrum Meeting Effectively?

How To Build High-Performance Agile Teams

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