How much adaptivity is enough? PandaDoc's Journey with Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) by Denis Salnikov and Alena Hlekava

This video details PandaDoc's experience evolving its organizational design using the Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) framework. Denis Salnikov, Head of Agile Practices at PandaDoc, discusses the company's growth, the challenges faced, and the adaptations made along the way.

Key Takeaways:

• Adapting, Not Just Implementing: PandaDoc focused on tailoring the organizational design to its specific needs rather than strictly implementing a framework [01:08].

• Company Growth: Founded in 2011 to automate sales quotes [03:38], PandaDoc achieved unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation by 2021 [04:05]. As of the talk, the company has over 800 employees globally, with 350 in product and engineering across 48 teams [04:16].

• Evolution of Organizational Design:

  • Early 2021 (Early Growth): Implemented LeSS Huge, introducing requirement areas focused on customer profiles. Teams were considered the core organizational unit, emphasizing long-lived, stable teams [07:15]. The structure included four key requirement areas and a platform requirement area [08:29].

  • Late 2022 (Hypergrowth): With 45 teams, managing the product backlog became challenging for the CTO [10:19]. The product owner's role shifted to defining investments in requirement areas [10:42]. An incubation area for new product ideas was introduced [11:07]. The company also prioritized employee safety by relocating staff from Belarus and Ukraine and shifted to a remote-first work model [12:06, 13:19].

  • Maturation Stage: The company hypothesized that different requirement areas might have different optimization goals [16:51]. They aimed to separate structures from people for easier team movement and reduced the number of requirement areas to three [17:13, 17:28]. A key focus became addressing accumulated system fatigue within the application and organization [17:44]. Currently, there are three requirement areas, each with distinct optimization goals [20:10].

• Future Endeavors: PandaDoc is experimenting to measure and understand the optimal level of adaptivity [20:58] and is developing a multi-app experience for its customers [21:19].

• Q&A Highlights: The discussion touched upon measuring adaptivity, separating structures from people, and managing numerous teams with a single product owner [21:37].

In essence, the video offers an in-depth look at PandaDoc's journey with LeSS, emphasizing the adaptation required during growth and the continuous efforts to optimize their organizational system.