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.