cross-functional teams Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Maria Skvortsova: The Team That Gave Up — When Green Reports Mask a Sinking Ship

“They said, ‘Yeah, we know, but no one will listen to us.’ And they just gave up — waiting for the ship to sink so they could swim away.” — Maria Skvortsova

Maria walked into a 20-person migration team where the PowerPoint reports glowed green but the reality on the ground was covered in red flags. Developers were building features against requirements that had already changed — nobody had told them.

The scope was impossibly large, and when Maria asked the team why they hadn’t raised a red flag, the answer shook her: “No one will listen to us.” The team had given up. They were waiting for the project to fail so they could leave. Maria’s first instinct was to observe — spend weeks understanding the dynamics, the communication patterns, the culture.

But she learned the hard way that when a team is already drowning, there’s no time for a slow ramp-up. She needed to act immediately. Her breakthrough came from a simple technique: replacing some daily standups with an async RAG (Red-Amber-Green) status system in Jira.

Team members just chose a color for each story — no explanation needed. It gave them psychological safety to signal problems without speaking up in a 20-person meeting. From there, Maria broke the team into smaller cross-functional groups — one QA, one developer, one consultant — so they could actually discuss features instead of hiding behind silence.

Self-reflection Question: When you join a new team and sense that something is deeply wrong, how long do you wait before acting — and is that waiting period serving the team or just your own comfort?

Featured Book of the Week: Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem

Maria chose Zombie Scrum Survival Guide because, as she puts it, “Most Scrum Masters learn by the happy path. We all know how it should be. But we rarely think about how it should not be.” The book focuses on detecting anti-patterns early — before they become entrenched behaviors that are much harder to break.

Maria finds it especially valuable because it provides concrete experiments you can try with your team to shake off the zombie symptoms. Her advice: start here, because understanding what bad looks like is just as important as knowing the ideal.

In this segment, we refer to Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem. Also check out the episode with Barry and Christiaan, authors of the book, on the podcast.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Maria Skvortsova

Maria is a Delivery Manager and Agile Coach who thrives in complexity, bringing clarity to chaotic environments. With a decade in C++ development and a background in professional opera, she blends technical precision with human empathy, helping enterprise teams move beyond task execution to collaborate seamlessly and perform like a synchronized, high-impact orchestra.

You can link with Maria Skvortsova on LinkedIn.

BONUS: How AI Is Reshaping Software Teams From the Inside — Lessons From Google, Meta, and Snowflake

In this episode, Dwarak Rajagopal — VP of AI Engineering and Research at Snowflake — shares what he’s seeing firsthand as AI agents become part of the software development process. From compressed sprint cycles to automated standups across time zones, Dwarak draws on two decades of building AI infrastructure at Google, Meta, Uber, and Apple to show what’s actually changing inside engineering organizations today.

From Compiler Engineer to AI Leader — The Thread That Connects Two Decades

“In AI, the hardest part isn’t just the models itself, it’s making them work in real environments where data is messy, fragmented, and governed.”

Dwarak started his career as an open-source GCC compiler engineer over two decades ago, optimizing hardware performance. He moved into graphics at Apple, then pivoted to AI when AlexNet started running on GPUs around 2011-2012. From there, he built autonomous driving software at Uber, led Meta’s PyTorch core framework team bridging research and production, and at Google led AI Frameworks including getting Gemini training on TPUs. The common thread: always working at the intersection of research and production, making powerful technology work in the real world. That focus on real-world application is what drew him to Snowflake — where enterprise data meets AI at scale.

AI Is Changing What Engineers Actually Do All Day

“Engineers are spending more time on system design, validation, production reliability — and less time doing the implementation itself, because AI is helping that.” Continue reading BONUS: How AI Is Reshaping Software Teams From the Inside — Lessons From Google, Meta, and Snowflake

Viktor Glinka: From Component Teams to Cross-Functional Teams — How to Navigate the Hardest Agile Transformation

“Our customers do not buy our components. They use the product as a whole. And when it comes to integration, the real problem pops up.” – Viktor Glinka

Viktor brings a challenge many Scrum Masters face: transitioning from component teams to cross-component, cross-functional teams in a large-scale Scrum setup.

Picture 8 to 10 teams, each owning their own part of the system, never touching anything else — and the company stuck in delivery for months. The premise behind component teams sounds logical: specialization leads to speed. But as Viktor explains, that speed is local — optimized for the component, not the product. When integration time arrives, responsibility gaps appear, rework multiplies, and teams start identifying with their components rather than the product. “We’re the billing team — we don’t deal with anything else.”

When they reorganized into cross-functional teams, the complaints were immediate: “I was really productive before, and now I can’t finish anything.” Viktor and his fellow Scrum Masters took a two-pronged approach. First, they secured time credit from leadership — a couple of months where learning was prioritized over deadlines.

They ran mob programming sessions, coached teams, and removed impediments. Second, they shifted focus from outputs to outcomes, organizing customer interviews that helped developers understand what users actually needed.

The development director reinforced this by joining refinement sessions, telling teams: “You might not need to develop anything if it still satisfies the customer need.” The result was a shift from transactional stakeholder relationships to genuine cooperation, and teams that began to see beyond their component boundaries.

Self-reflection Question: If your teams are organized around components, what would it take to run one experiment — just one sprint — where a team picks up work outside their usual component? What would you need to make that safe?

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

About Viktor Glinka

Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He’s practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability – both in business and in personal life.

You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Why Every Organization Reinvents Silos—And What to Do About It, With Roland Flemm

Today we speak with Roland Flemm, co-creator of Org Topologies and co-author of 10X Org — Powered by Org Topologies. Roland has spent decades in the trenches—first as a developer, then in infrastructure, and finally as a Scrum Master, trainer, and organizational design consultant. In this episode, he explains why even teenagers with zero corporate experience instinctively create departmental silos, why making every team faster doesn’t make the whole organization faster, and how leaders can use the Org Topologies map to see their organization as it actually is—not as the org chart says it should be.

From Developer to Org Designer: Four Decades of Hitting the Same Wall

“I felt many, many times the limitations of organizational structures stopping me from using my common sense to make people work together in a proper way.”

Roland’s career spans over 40 years, starting as a developer in 1984. After a decade writing code and another decade in infrastructure, he moved into Scrum and agile coaching. But even as a highly effective Scrum Master, he kept hitting the same ceiling: local team improvements couldn’t break through organizational boundaries. You could have wins with your team, but the moment you needed multiple teams to work together, someone higher up would shut it down. That frustration led him to Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman, which offered a more educated approach to multi-team collaboration—and eventually to co-creating Org Topologies as a way to help leaders see and change the structures that block real collaboration.

Bas has been on the podcast to share his view on scaling Scrum with LeSS, listen to his episode here.

The Hydrogen Car That Built Its Own Silos

“If you don’t think about your org design—the way that you want to collaborate—then something like this happens.” Continue reading BONUS: Why Every Organization Reinvents Silos—And What to Do About It, With Roland Flemm

BONUS: Martti Kuldma shares how to transform century-old organizations through product-driven agile transformation

In this BONUS episode we explore the remarkable transformation journey at Omniva with CEO Martti Kuldma. From traditional postal services to innovative logistics solutions, we explore how a 100+ year old company embraced product thinking, DevOps practices, and agile transformation to become a competitive force in modern logistics.

Omniva’s Digital Evolution—IT as a Revenue Center

“We innovated the parcel machine business for a few years, and software has been an area of investment for us – software as a separate vertical in our business.”

Omniva represents a fascinating case study in organizational transformation. While many know it as Estonia’s post office, the company has evolved into an international logistics powerhouse with significant revenue streams beyond traditional postal services. Under Martti’s leadership, the organization has reimagined software not as a support function but as a core revenue driver, positioning itself for the dramatic shifts expected in logistics delivery over the next five years.

The Vision: Physical Mailing as the Next IP Network

“The Vision: physical mailing as the next IP network – this will give us a lot more freedom to adapt to changes in delivery demand.”

Martti’s strategic vision extends far beyond conventional logistics thinking. By conceptualizing physical delivery networks similar to internet protocols, Omniva is preparing for a future where logistics companies leverage their physical infrastructure advantages. This approach addresses the fundamental challenge of fluctuating demand in e-commerce and traditional logistics, creating opportunities for crowd delivery solutions and gig economy integration that capitalize on existing network effects.

Breaking Down Waterfall Barriers

“When I came we had waterfall processes – annual budgeting, procurement for software development. It took a couple of weeks to do the first rounds, and understand what could be improved.” Continue reading BONUS: Martti Kuldma shares how to transform century-old organizations through product-driven agile transformation