Scrum Of Scrums

Today I was investigating a method of using scrum where the team is growing too large for a single scrum team. All the meetings were just starting to take too long and lots of people were getting bored as large amounts of time were being taken to discuss tasks that weren’t relevant to everyone. I haven’t needed this before due to the fairly small scale adoption in the places I have worked however a quick search turned up the simple idea of Scrum of Scrums. Explained fairly well in this Scrum Institute Article.

This seems to solve my problem fairly well. As a basic overview, the basic scrum team of less than 6 or so works as usual. Then just muliply this basic unit out to n (initially we will be staring with 2). I see this somewhat like functions. We know the inputs and outputs but don’t care about the details. The differences only occur when you start thinking about how to align all those smaller units. How to manage this network?

Thats what I’m not so sure about. The article offered an approach where all tasks go into a common backlog and then are moved to different teams based on priority and product/role. I think this will work well initially but may be difficult to manage as we start adding teams. Maybe just manage the Epics at this high level? Regardless, this seems promising and I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out.