Recently, couple of my teams decided to combine their codebases. It was essentially the same application, written twice over to do the UI for a wizard that went down 2 paths. Their backends do very different things. However, the customer sees a very similar interface.
After having done the migration, there have been some gripes. There is a lot of waiting between time zones. Ownership isn’t clear. Operational setup hasn’t been worked out. Perhaps the biggest issue was that there are two teams for a single codebase. It seems to trip people up when it comes to figuring things out.
So I’ve been asking this one question over and over:
Imagine the other team reported to you (or you were part of the same team). How would you solve this?
Another version of this question:
Imagine you had 15 people in your team across 2 locations. How would you run your scrum processes?
Once you remove the artificial manager/team/pod based barrier, people seem to work it out. This little mental barrier is the root of a lot of problems when collaborating. It is really important for people to identify their tribe. For most people, their tribe is their scrum team. Increasingly, that isn’t good enough to get the best results. At least in my team, we need to expand our view of what our tribe is.