Olaitan Fashanu: Three Teams, Three Backlogs, One Feature—Can You Make Them See Each Other?

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"How do we ensure that these teams actually work together to show the same data?" - Olaitan Fashanu

 

Olaitan brings a problem most Scrum Masters in scaled environments will recognize. Three teams. Three separate backlogs. One product, accessed across app, web, and support channels. Leadership made a top-down team topologies decision: split the work to move faster. Predictable result—each team optimizes for their own backlog, blind to what the others are building, sometimes shipping the same feature twice with different behaviors. The product owners know there's overlap. The teams love the idea of linking tickets across backlogs. They just won't maintain the habit. Olaitan and Vasco walk through experiments together: a sync between POs, joint refinement sessions, linking tickets, putting "this is also being built by Team B" notes at the top of stories. The deeper insight: the Scrum Master's job is to keep surfacing information until a habit forms. As Vasco's old lifting coach put it—you find the imbalance, you get rid of the imbalance, one by one. That's how you get stronger.

 

In this episode, we refer to team topologies and the practice of surfacing information across team boundaries.

 

Self-reflection Question: Where in your organization are teams unknowingly building the same thing twice—and what's the smallest experiment you could run this week to make that visible?

 

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About Olaitan Fashanu

 

Olaitan Fashanu is a customer-focused professional with expertise in product management, technology, and coaching. He drives digital and agile transformation, builds collaborative cross-functional teams, and delivers high-quality products across markets. Curious and strategic, he explores AI and data intelligence while balancing technical depth, business goals, culture, structure, and long-term vision.

 

You can link with Olaitan Fashanu on LinkedIn.