Fairway Sessions | Agile & Project Management Consulting

About This Workshop

Scaling agile is not about choosing a framework. It is about understanding why scaling is hard — and what specific organisational, structural, and technical choices will either accelerate or undermine coordination across multiple teams.

This two-day workshop examines the real challenges of scaling: Conway's Law and its implications for team structure, the coordination overhead that grows non-linearly with team count, the tension between team autonomy and cross-team alignment, and the specific conditions under which different scaling approaches work or fail.

We cover the major scaling frameworks — SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, and Scrum at Scale — with a critical eye on what they solve, what they introduce, and which contexts each is suited to. The workshop prioritises thinking over prescription: participants leave with the analytical tools to evaluate their own context and make informed architectural and structural decisions, rather than a framework implementation checklist.

Best For

For product and engineering leadership planning to scale beyond two or three teams, for agile coaches and Scrum Masters working across a growing portfolio, for organisations that have adopted a scaling framework and are questioning whether it was the right choice, or for anyone designing team topologies for a new product organisation.

Learning Objectives

Articulate why scaling agile is fundamentally different from doing agile at team level

Understand Conway's Law and apply it to team topology design

Compare SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, and Scrum at Scale across key design dimensions

Identify the specific organisational conditions that determine which scaling approach will work

Design team structures that minimise coordination overhead while preserving delivery autonomy

Evaluate and address the most common scaling failure patterns

Apply Team Topologies principles to design stream-aligned, platform, and enabling teams

Plan a pragmatic path from current state to a more scalable organisational design

Common Challenges This Addresses

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Organisations selecting a scaling framework based on vendor marketing rather than fit assessment

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SAFe implementations that have added process overhead without improving delivery speed

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Multiple teams technically using the same framework but operating completely differently

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Team topology decisions made for political or historical reasons rather than flow optimisation

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Leadership expecting scaling frameworks to solve problems that are fundamentally cultural or technical

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Agile coaches unable to advise on scaling questions because they only know one framework

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Teams at scale experiencing more coordination friction than they did at small scale

Workshop Agenda

Why Scaling Is Hard: The Coordination Problem

We begin with first principles: why coordination overhead grows faster than team count, what Conway's Law actually predicts about software architecture and team structure, and why most scaling problems are structural, not process problems.

Scaling Frameworks: SAFe & LeSS

SAFe and LeSS examined critically: what problems each was designed to solve, what they require from the organisation to work well, and the specific failure modes that are most common in each. Case studies from real implementations.

Scaling Frameworks: Nexus, Scrum at Scale & Team Topologies

The lighter-weight scaling approaches and the Team Topologies model. We explore how stream-aligned, platform, and enabling team structures create the conditions for autonomous teams that can also coordinate effectively.

Context Assessment Workshop

Participants assess their own organisational context across key dimensions: product architecture, current team structure, coordination overhead, technical practices, and leadership maturity. This produces a framework fit profile.

Scaling Design & Implementation Planning

Using the context assessment, participants design or refine their organisation's scaling approach. The session produces a concrete starting point and a set of prioritised interventions, not a transformation roadmap that no one will follow.