Why Collaboration Gets Harder as Teams Scale
Collaboration in large-scale organisations often reveals friction in places teams expect to run smoothly. As product and development functions scale, the number of moving parts increases. So does the risk of misalignment.
At Easy Agile, conversations with our customers frequently surface familiar challenges. While each organisation is unique, the core struggles of collaboration are shared. To protect the privacy of the teams we spoke to, we’ve anonymised all quotes. But every insight is real, direct from the people doing the work.
This post is for anyone navigating the complexity of scaled collaboration, whether you're leading a team or working within one. Sometimes the hardest part is seeing the problem clearly. These are the patterns teams are running into, the questions they’re wrestling with, and the cracks that emerge when planning, alignment, and communication break down. Understanding and acknowledging these issues is the first step toward solving them.
Here’s what teams are experiencing and the key questions they’re grappling with as they scale collaboration.
TL;DR – Common collaboration challenges in scale-ups and enterprises:
- Teams struggle with communication and alignment, especially when working across multiple teams or departments
- Managing cross-team dependencies is a significant challenge, often causing delays and requiring frequent coordination
- Capacity planning and skill allocation are difficult, particularly when teams have to balance project work with ongoing operational tasks
- Teams face challenges in breaking down work effectively and maintaining visibility of progress across different teams
- Frequent changes in priorities and scope creep disrupt team planning and execution
- There are difficulties in translating high-level strategy into actionable team priorities and objectives
- Teams struggle with effective retrospectives and continuous improvement processes
What breaks down in cross-team communication?
Communication challenges tend to intensify with scale. As soon as multiple teams are involved, misalignment becomes more likely. A Senior Product Manager from a global HR tech firm described a pattern many teams will recognise:
"One of the main themes I heard in conversations with leadership was the lack of process, transparency, visibility, and dependency tracking. It’s always been manual across teams. We’ve done a really good job, but there’s an opportunity to do better."
Another team member highlighted how this disconnect tends to grow over time:
"At the start of each quarter, our conversations are strategic and cross-functional, involving sales and strategy teams. But as we dive deeper into execution, communication shrinks down to daily engineering huddles, and essential alignment details often get lost."
The problem isn't a lack of communication, but rather a shift in its focus. When delivery takes centre stage, strategic context gets sidelined. When teams move into execution mode, that shift in communication cadence creates blind spots across departments, leading to confusion, duplicated work, or misaligned outputs.
Why is managing dependencies across teams so difficult?
Dependencies create friction when they aren’t visible or clearly owned. Coordination across teams can be derailed by unclear sequencing, late handovers, or competing timelines. An Agile Coach at a financial institution shared:
"We had to run bi-weekly cross-program dependency calls just to stay on top of what was blocking who. We just list dependencies manually, there isn’t any unified visibility. At the ART level, it’s a mix of RTEs, Scrum Masters, and team members trying to link things, but beyond that, it falls apart"
A delivery leader at a global credit bureau reinforced the limitations of existing tools:
"I’ve never successfully been able to really tackle dependency visualization and put a process around that. It's always been manual. When I'm speaking to an executive, that means something... But when I'm speaking to someone on an agile team, it changes as it rolls up...Without proper plugins, even a robust tool like Jira struggles to provide clear dependency visuals. Planning becomes complicated quickly, leaving teams stuck."
Dependency risk increases when shared work isn’t tracked or visualised in a way that’s accessible to all stakeholders. Teams need to see not just their own work, but how it connects with others. Teams need more than awareness - they need shared visibility, clarity on ownership, and consistent ways to plan around dependencies.
How do teams manage capacity when demands keep shifting?
Planning team capacity isn’t just about headcount, but also about competing demands. Teams are often asked to deliver roadmap initiatives while supporting legacy systems, resolving production issues, or addressing technical debt. A product leader from a cybersecurity company shared:
"We’re always trying to achieve a lot with limited resources, and it makes roadmapping really difficult. We’ve made progress in estimating the team's bandwidth more accurately by looking at what they actually delivered last quarter. But we still hit the same issue - too many topics, too little time."
Another team shared how they introduced tighter prioritisation controls using a third-party tool, but even rigid structures have their limits:
"We use XXX as a source of truth for prioritisation. We have around 80 different initiatives prioritised from 1 to 80 of importance... no meeting can be scheduled if the project is not approved in the tool."
This helped formalise approvals and reduce noise, but it also revealed a deeper issue. Even with a strict gating process, the volume of initiatives stayed high, and prioritisation alone couldn’t solve for limited capacity. Clearer structures don’t automatically reduce the demand on teams or ease delivery expectations. That tension persists unless strategic scope is also narrowed.
What makes work breakdown and visibility so hard to maintain?
Breaking down initiatives into independent, testable stories is not always straightforward, especially when scope is uncertain or spans months. A software engineer working across multiple teams explained:
"Breaking work down is hard - some teams still think in layers. They say, ‘This only delivers value when the whole thing’s done.’ On top of that, we often run big planning in a five-hour day or stretch it awkwardly over two days. Third parties and shared services don’t get folded into teams, which makes breakdown and clarity harder."
Large epics often outlive the context in which they were created. As scope evolves, teams may struggle to maintain clear acceptance criteria and shared understanding.
An Agile Coach reinforced how hard it is to keep sight of progress:
"We break each story into smaller pieces as much as possible where it's testable by itself so the testing team can test it... But if it’s a lengthy project, spanning more than two months, it’s easy to lose clarity and effectiveness...Consistently tracking actions across multiple sprints involves endless toggling. It's difficult to quickly understand what's truly improving and what’s still stuck."
As work grows more complex, clarity suffers. Without reliable visibility, work risks stalling or repeating unnecessarily. Teams need tools, systems, and shared language to ensure breakdowns don’t get lost in the shuffle and progress remains meaningful.
Why do changing priorities and scope creep derail plans?
Frequent priority changes and scope creep disrupt planning discipline. They often signal deeper issues: vague goals, shifting leadership expectations, or unclear ownership. One product leader summed it up:
"Priorities used to switch constantly - sometimes halfway through a project, we’d have 30% done and then get pulled into something else. That context-switching really hurts. It demoralises engineers who were already deep into a feature. We had to raise it in a full engineering and product retrospective just to get some stability."
Another shared the toll it takes on delivery teams:
"We often found ourselves mid-quarter pivoting to newly emerging business needs, without fully aligning on what gets dropped. That lack of clarity meant engineers felt whiplash, and team goals kept shifting."
Without stable anchors in the form of clear goals and boundaries, even well-planned work can unravel. Work, then, expands to fill the available sprint, regardless of long-term impact, which brings us to the next challenge.
What stops teams from aligning strategy to daily work?
Teams need clear goals. But clarity breaks down when strategic objectives are too broad or when every team interprets them differently. A senior product manager explained:
"Prioritisation is only as good as your strategy, and ours wasn’t clear. The business goal was just ‘grow revenue,’ but what does that mean? Acquisition? Retention? Everyone wrote their own product objectives. It became a bit of a free-for-all. When goals are vague, it’s hard to prioritise work that ladders up to anything concrete."
Another added:
"We all set objectives tied to broad company goals, but when those goals lack precision, our objectives become misaligned, making prioritisation difficult and often inconsistent."
Without alignment between leadership priorities and team-level execution, valuable work can feel directionless. Objectives become outputs rather than outcomes.
What holds back meaningful retrospectives?
Retrospectives are intended to surface learning. But without consistent follow-through, they risk becoming routine. One Agile Coach shared how to keep them practical:
"We’ve tried tools where you just send a link and everyone rates how hard it was to get something done. But too often, it ends up with one person speaking and everyone else just agreeing. We’re trying to avoid the loudest voice dominating the retro. It’s still a challenge to get real, reflective conversations."
Another shared the risk of retro fatigue:
"To track action items consistently isn't easy... I have to toggle down and look at each one, which can make things cumbersome when ensuring certain behaviours have stuck...Effective retrospectives should surface recurring issues, not just review the recent past. Discussing ongoing challenges helps teams proactively tackle problems and move forward."
The barrier is rarely the ceremony - it’s the follow-up. Teams need lightweight ways to track retro actions, validate changes, and revisit unresolved pain points.
Where to focus
Improving collaboration means addressing the systems and habits that hold teams back:
- Keep strategic conversations active, not just at quarterly planning.
- Visualise and track cross-team dependencies clearly.
- Protect capacity for both roadmap work and operational stability.
- Break work into testable, clearly defined pieces.
- Reinforce the connection between business goals and delivery priorities.
- Make retrospective actions visible and measurable.
The teams we speak to aren’t struggling because they lack process. They’re navigating complexity. The opportunity lies in simplifying where it matters and supporting teams with the clarity to make progress, together.
The first step is recognising these patterns and giving them language. When teams can see and name the problem, they’re already on the path to solving it.
How Easy Agile can help
Whether you're dealing with blurred dependencies, vague objectives or sprint volatility, Easy Agile offers three purpose-built solutions to help teams stay aligned:
- Easy Agile Programs brings structure and visibility to cross-team planning in Jira. Perfect for managing dependencies and long-range planning across multiple teams and projects.
- Easy Agile Roadmaps gives every team a simple, shared timeline view, so they can prioritise and sequence work with strategic context.
- Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes sprint planning, story mapping, and retrospectives more engaging and purposeful, turning agile ceremonies into actionable, team-owned progress.
Related Articles
Agile Best PracticeHow to Create a Team Charter: Template and Guide for Engineering and Product Teams
High-performing teams don't happen by accident. They're built through intentional conversations about how to work together effectively.
Creating alignment isn't about one-off workshops. It's about clarity that sticks. A team charter gives agile teams the shared understanding they need to work better together, especially as teams grow, change, and evolve how they work. Without one, ambiguity creeps in, especially in remote or distributed environments where body language and hallway conversations aren't an option.
TL;DR
- A team charter is a shared agreement that defines how a team works together.
- It helps build trust, align expectations, and reduce friction.
- Creating one involves four stages: define purpose, agree on behaviours, map workflows, and embed the document.
- It evolves with the team and supports onboarding, retros, and continuous improvement.
What is a Team Charter?
A team charter is a living document co-created by the team. It outlines the team's shared understanding around purpose, values, responsibilities, and ways of working. It sets the tone for how people communicate, collaborate, and make decisions.
Think of it as a blueprint for a high-performing team: aspirational, but grounded in the daily realities of team life, and aligned with agile ceremonies like stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives that reinforce shared understanding. It reduces duplication, limits confusion, and gives structure to how we operate - even when the unexpected shows up.
Benefits of a Team Charter for Agile Teams
At its core, a team charter addresses the fundamental questions that cause most team dysfunction:
- What is our purpose as a team? Why do we exist?
- What is within the scope of our team?
- What outcomes are we accountable for?
- How do we treat each other as team members?
- How do we make decisions and communicate?
- What are our individual roles and responsibilities?
- How do we celebrate success?
What a Well-Crafted Team Charter Can Unlock
1. Clarity and Alignment
A team charter serves as a clear roadmap that defines the team's mission, goals, roles, and responsibilities. It ensures everyone understands how their work contributes to team success.
2. Better Decision-Making
When responsibilities and communication protocols are clear, decisions are made faster and more consistently.
3. Improved Communication
Establishing communication norms upfront ensures smoother knowledge sharing and transparency.
4. Accountability and Ownership
Team members know what they're responsible for, fostering commitment and initiative.
5. Trust and Team Cohesion
The collaborative process of creating a charter builds trust and empathy, and strengthens team dynamics.
6. Continuous Improvement
Team charters encourage feedback and reflection, evolving with your team over time.
7. Streamlined Onboarding
Team charter serves as a vital guide for new team members, offering clear insight into the team's norms, values, and workflows, accelerating their integration and boosting early productivity.
8. Living Reference Document
The charter acts as a reference tool that keeps everyone grounded and aligned as the team changes.
Four Practical Steps to Build a Team Charter
The team charter process is typically split into four interactive sessions. Each phase builds on the last and creates the trust, clarity, and psychological safety needed for the next.
Phase 1: Define Purpose and People
The team's mission refers to the objective or goal that a team is set to achieve. It is a clear and concise statement that defines the team's purpose and the value it aims to deliver.
Start by co-creating the team's mission statement. Team members contribute by answering: "What value do we deliver? What impact do we want to have?"
Everyone shares their input, then the team votes on the mission statements that resonate most. You can even combine parts from several to create the final version.
Once established, the mission should be displayed publicly where everyone can see it and team members can reference it.
Then we go deeper, with Personal Operating Instructions (POIs). This phase focuses on understanding team members as individuals. Each person answers questions like:
- What do you love about your job?
- What motivates you?
- How do you like to work?
- When do you work best?
- What do you want help to look like?
This helps us build empathy and challenge assumptions. It makes team members understand behaviours and uncover ways to support one another.
Phase 2: Create a Working Agreement
A working agreement is a team-designed agreement for an aspirational set of values, behaviours and social norms. Think of it as a vision for how it would be to work in an incredibly safe and powerful team.
This is where the real power lies, where you get specific about operations. Through a mix of guided reflection and group synthesis, the team explores questions like:
- What makes a great team vs. a terrible team?
- How do we communicate?
- How do we make decisions?
- What are our top responsibilities?
- What are our daily rhythms (e.g., stand-ups, reviews)?
And don’t stop at logistics, go deeper:
- How do we give feedback?
- What do we do when someone’s stuck?
- How do we balance collaboration and deep work?
- How do we share knowledge?
- How do we run meetings?
- How do we support remote or hybrid work?
- How do we protect focus time?
- How do we resolve disagreements?
From this, draft short, memorable working agreement statements. For example: "We default to asynchronous communication whenever possible," or "We commit to reviewing pull requests within 24 hours." Themes like "Diverse opinions welcome" or "Refactoring is a first-class citizen" should emerge.
💡 Tip: If your team uses Easy Agile TeamRhythm, you can incorporate these agreements into planning and retro directly.
Here are two examples of working agreements:
Image Source 
Image Source Phase 3: Map an Operational Agreement
Next, turn principles into rituals. Visualise your delivery flow using tools like Kanban boards, swimlanes, or service blueprints, whatever format helps your team see the full picture clearly:
- Who leads each stage?
- What’s working?
- What’s broken?
- What needs to be true for work to move forward?
Capture frictions around unclear ownership or ambiguous definitions. This surfaces hidden blockers and leads to better alignment.
💡 Tip: Consider using a collaborative tool like Miro, Easy Agile Programs, or whiteboarding sessions to map your current process together.
Phase 4: Make It Stick
A charter only works if it lives in your team’s daily rhythm. Otherwise, it risks becoming 'shelfware' that gets created once and forgotten. Keep it active, visible, and revisited to maintain its impact.
- Share and communicate: Make it accessible and visible.
- Live by the charter: Role model the behaviours you agreed on.
- Review and update regularly: Revisit and evolve it as your team changes.
- Use as a reference: Ground retrospectives and decisions in it.
- Reflect often: Use it to discuss what’s working and what’s not.
💡 Tip: Add your charter as a living page in your team workspace (like Confluence) and link to it in your planning tools.
Onboarding New Team Members with a Charter
When someone new joins the team, it's time to review the charter. Here’s a step-by-step onboarding process:
- Initial walkthrough: A team lead introduces the charter and context.
- Time to absorb: The new member reads and reflects.
- Team review: The team invites their feedback and updates the charter together.
This creates buy-in and strengthens psychological safety.
💡 Tip: Schedule a 30-minute team check-in with each new hire after their first two weeks to revisit the charter together.
The Foundation of High Performance
A team charter isn’t just a document. It’s a shared commitment to how you work together. It evolves as your team does, helping you navigate change and stay aligned.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that culture isn’t declared. It’s designed, together.
Whether forming a new team or elevating an existing one, your charter is a powerful first step toward intentional, aligned collaboration.
Suggested Next Step
Looking to embed your team charter into your team's everyday rhythm? Easy Agile apps like TeamRhythm and Programs help teams turn working agreements into action by aligning daily rituals such as sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives, and PI planning.
Agile Best PracticePowering Alignment and Empathy in Agile Teams
Weaving alignment and empathy into team dynamics can revolutionize software delivery. So why aren't we all doing that?
It's a real challenge for organizations with numerous teams contributing to complex software, to achieve real alignment and consensus on user needs. But it's one well worth pursuing. Striking a balance between alignment on business goals and customer empathy ensures that the software your teams are developing truly resonates with users and fulfills those business goals.
Why Alignment Matters in Agile Programs
Alignment is more than just goal setting across teams. It's about connecting workflows, acknowledging challenges, and crafting solutions that encompass everyone’s perspectives, including the needs of your users. As Tony Camacho shared on the Easy Agile Podcast:
"Alignment isn’t just about goals—it’s about understanding each other’s workflows, needs, and challenges to create solutions that work for everyone."
This comprehensive strategic alignment is crucial for steering teams in the same direction. In large enterprises, team alignment means that agile release trains can function cohesively, and strategic business goals are successfully translated across diverse teams and departments. Strong alignment empowers cross-functional teams to sustain momentum and unity at scale, even as the product roadmap evolves. For agile release trains, effective alignment means that everyone is doing their part, pulling in the same direction, and delivering successful software.
Customer Empathy and User-Centric Development
Customer empathy is the cornerstone of aligning business goals with user needs and developing software that delivers a seamless user experience. It's about getting to know your users, their needs, and their experience with your product so that you can create better solutions for them.
"The key to meeting user needs is empathy. When teams deeply understand their users, every product decision naturally aligns with providing value."
Tony Comacho
This ethos fuels decision-making and design that prioritizes user needs and values over functional deliverables. It's great to build and release something, but not-so-great if nobody uses it. Agile leaders who embed empathy within their teams cultivate a customer-driven culture, resulting in software solutions that address genuine challenges and delight their audience.Empathy enhances the process of gathering requirements, conducting user testing, and embracing iterative design. Combined with effective agile program management, empathy aligns business goals with user expectations, and is a great way to improve engagement with your software and reduce churn, paving the way for successful software delivery and user retention.
Building Clarity for Effective Collaboration
Building impactful software at scale demands effective collaboration and clarity.
"Effective collaboration is rooted in clarity. Teams need to feel supported by having a shared vision and understanding of the product journey."
Cross-team alignment revolves around establishing a unified vision and setting clear goals and expectations across the agile release train. For enterprise agile solutions that support PI Planning and Product Roadmapping, upholding this clarity allows large teams to work independently yet cohesively, ensuring a targeted approach to addressing both business and user needs.
How to Achieve Agile Alignment at Scale
To encourage team alignment around user needs in your organization:
- Invest in User Research & Design: Start talking to your users; and keep talking to them. Implement user-focused design practices, gathering insights from users throughout the development stages to effectively align user needs and business goals.
- Share Vision and Goals: Regularly communicate with your teams about business objectives and user needs, ensuring they are central to your agile program.
- Use Alignment Tools and Frameworks: Leverage agile tools that help you track objectives and development milestones to ensure team alignment and cross-team collaboration. Make goals and priorities easily accessible for all your teams.
- Encourage Transparent Communication: Cultivate an environment where feedback crosses team boundaries, maintaining cross-team alignment and empathy.
The Benefits of Alignment and Empathy in Software Delivery
Better outcomes for your software start when business goals are aligned with user needs. Programs that place strategic agile alignment and customer empathy at the forefront, not only meet user expectations but improve the value they offer to their customers. With good agile program management, the outcome is a streamlined, effective agile release train that consistently delivers exceptional software solutions. Which is what we all want, right?
As you work towards better alignment in your agile program, nurturing empathy and clarity can unlock significant gains in satisfaction for your users and for your teams, which is great news for the overall success of your program.
🎧 Want to hear more from Tony? Listen to The power of team alignment on the Easy Agile Podcast.
Agile Best PracticeSix Tips for Improving Team Collaboration
The 17th State of Agile Report shared that 93% of executives thought that their teams could do the same amount of work in half the time, if their teams collaborated better.
That's quite a statistic. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this reflects a lack of efficiency due to poor collaboration, or a disconnect between leadership expectations and the realities faced by development teams.
What we do know is that improving team collaboration has benefits and that improved collaboration is a key benefit of effective agile practices.
So if you think your team could work more effectively, here are six tips for improving team collaboration that we think will make your working life better, and help you deliver for your customers.
1. Agile Teams Are Cross-Functional
Cross-functional teams are the backbone of agile collaboration. It's Agile 101:
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Ideally, your agile team should be able to deliver work independently. The skills and expertise of your team should allow you to handle diverse tasks without creating dependencies on other teams. You can take ownership of the software you're delivering.
The benefit of organizing into cross-functional teams is a greater shared understanding of your project, where you can each see how the pieces fit together. This type of collaboration supports the efficient flow of work and ensures that knowledge and skills are consistently shared.
2. Take an Iterative Approach
Or to put it another way, make it easier to fail fast, so your team can learn why, and correct your course. By breaking down large projects into manageable increments, your team can focus on delivering small, functional parts of working software at regular intervals. This approach goes hand-in-hand with continual feedback from users, ensuring that issues are uncovered quickly and dealt with just as fast. This shared team focus on user feedback, and the shared purpose and collaboration that comes with it, is a key benefit of agile development.
3. Maintain Regular and Transparent Communication
Daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and planning meetings are all designed to foster regular and clear communication. You and your team should see these meetings as an opportunity to share ideas, discuss progress and blockers, and collaborate. If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.
If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.
Someone who has wasted too much time in shopping-list meetings.
Beyond team meetings, clear communication is important anywhere the details of your work are shared. Agile tools like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provide a central platform for prioritizing work and tracking progress. With a central source of truth that everyone can access to understand goals, priorities, and team commitment, collaboration can be more effective, keeping the team aligned and focused.
4. Conduct Team Retrospectives
Hot take: regular retrospectives are the most important agile practice your team can adopt.
Team retrospectives provide a structured opportunity to reflect on your work and discuss how it can be done better next time. This is team-led improvement because you and your team are in the driver's seat. Encouraging honest and open discussions during retrospectives helps build trust among team members and fosters a collaborative mindset. By continuing to work on processes and behaviors, you and your team can improve your performance over time and make your working life better.
5. Use Collaboration Tools
The right tools can make a big difference in team collaboration. The best tools provide a reliable source of truth that the whole team can access, in a place where the whole team will access it. It's a simple concept; a shared understanding of the work is supported by shared and willing access to the same information.
Choose a tool that makes it easy for you and your team to access information and keep it updated. If you're already working in Jira, an integration like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides a better view of your work in a story map format, with goals, objectives, and team commitment all made clear. Team retrospective boards are attached to each sprint (or spun up as required for Kanban teams) so you have your team-led ideas for improvement tightly connected to the work in Jira.
No matter which tool you choose, make sure it will facilitate better alignment, streamline your workflows, and provide a clear picture of roadblocks and progress. By using collaboration tools effectively, your team stays organized, focused, and connected, no matter where each member is located.
6. Build a Positive Team Culture
It may sound obvious, but a positive team culture is essential for effective collaboration. Creating an environment where team members feel valued, respected, and motivated, encourages the psychological safety they need to share their great ideas, learn from missteps, and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.
High-performing teams recognize the achievements of others, share constructive feedback, and support practices that lead to a healthy work-life balance. Make it regular, and keep it authentic. A positive culture not only improves team dynamics but also boosts overall productivity and job satisfaction.
Successful Team Collaboration
Effective collaboration can be the difference between your team achieving their goals, or falling short. By embracing agile practices like the regular communication that comes from agile planning meetings, to the learnings that come from taking an interactive approach to development, and creating time for team-led improvement with retrospectives, you can seriously boost your team dynamics.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm Supports Team Collaboration
Easy Agile TeamRhythm is designed to make your agile practices more accessible and effective, helping your team plan, prioritize, and deliver work with better alignment and clarity.
Built around a story map for visualizing work and retrospective boards that encourage team-led improvement, TeamRhythm facilitates sprint and release planning, dependency management, backlog management, user story mapping, and retrospectives.
Tight integration with Jira makes Easy Agile TeamRhythm a reliable source of truth, no matter where you and your team members are located.
Watch a demo, learn about pricing, and try for yourself in our sandbox. Visit the Easy Agile TeamRhythm Features and Pricing page for more.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm