Matrix organizations have severe problems Usually, management structures are organized by discipline. That is, designers report to a head of UX, backend developers to a head of backend, and so on. The managers are responsible for several employees in different product teams (see Figure 1) and take on both management tasks (employee development, organization and planning, salary negotiations…) and leadership tasks (mentoring and coaching, creating vision and motivation). This setup brings some inherent challenges with it.

The Starting Point Our team had reached a size with over 20 members making it impossible to work efficiently. The usual Scrum meetings (Refinements, Estimations, Planning, Review and Retro) took longer and longer and felt incredibly dull. Many issues were discussed in detail during these meetings, but were often only relevant to a small group. Due to the size of the team and everyone’s strong desire to move quickly, a wide variety of topics had crept in, further fueling the situation.