Faster, more predictable delivery through Scrum and Design Thinking
A UK energy operator scaled product squads with clean Scrum discipline, integrated discovery, and a portfolio cadence that gave leaders real visibility into work.
Starting point
The UK offshore operator was growing its digital and product footprint, with multiple teams building in parallel across products and platforms. Each squad worked hard, but not always in the same direction. Cadence varied by team, backlogs were prepared to different standards, and discovery work was mostly ad hoc.
Leadership struggled to see the whole picture. There was no consistent view of priorities, no clear way to track progress across products, and limited visibility into dependencies or blockers that needed executive support. Teams shipped value, but with more surprises, rework, and friction than anyone wanted.
Approach
The client brought in an agile delivery lead, Bhuvan Maingi, now part of Strathen Group, to stand up and coach six cross functional Scrum teams while creating portfolio level visibility. The work began with a practical reset of team cadence and ceremonies. All six squads moved to two-to-four-week sprints with a full set of Scrum events, including daily stand ups, sprint planning, reviews with demos, and retrospectives focused on actionable experiments.
Backlog hygiene was standardized so that teams had a shared language for quality. Definition of Ready and Definition of Done were agreed and applied, estimation and refinement followed a consistent rhythm, and acceptance criteria became clearer and more testable. Story mapping helped product owners and engineers break large ideas into smaller, deliverable increments that could fit within a sprint and be demonstrated at the end.
Design thinking was embedded alongside Scrum rather than treated as a separate initiative. A light discovery track ran ahead of delivery, moving through empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. User interviews, job to be done framing, and journey pain points shaped problem definitions and “How might we” questions. Low fidelity flows, data mocks, and quick technical spikes were used to de risk unknowns. Only validated items moved into sprint backlogs, creating a dual track discovery and delivery model.
At the portfolio level, a simple but disciplined operating rhythm was introduced. Weekly cross team syncs gave product and engineering leads a space to surface dependencies, risks, and cross cutting decisions. A monthly portfolio review with executives looked at sprint goals, velocity ranges, milestone forecasts, and a focused list of impediments that required leadership action. Risks and issues were captured in RAID logs and tracked through these forums.
Flow and quality practices were added without overburdening teams. Work in progress limits were introduced to reduce multitasking. Cumulative flow and burn up charts made bottlenecks and scope changes visible. Carry over was tracked with reason codes and light root cause analysis so that squads could see patterns and adjust. Lightweight quality gates on non-functional checks and dependencies helped reduce surprises late in delivery.
Executive reporting was built on top of these new habits. Instead of separate slide decks from each team, leaders saw a single portfolio view that summarized sprint goals, progress against milestones, velocity trends, and key risks. The focus shifted from detailed status updates to decisions on sequencing, funding, and unblocking.
Bringing six squads onto one Scrum and portfolio rhythm shifted delivery from local heroics to predictable, transparent progress every sprint.
Outcome
Within a few sprints, the six squads began to operate on a more reliable cadence. Each team had visible sprint goals, ran regular demos, and closed out work more consistently against a shared Definition of Done. Leaders could see working increments every two to four weeks instead of waiting for long project phases to finish.
Discovery integration improved the “build right” rate. By validating problem and solution fit before commitment, teams reduced downstream rework and avoided filling backlogs with poorly framed or low value items. Design thinking gave product owners and engineers a common way to talk about user needs, options, and tradeoffs before tickets were created.
The portfolio dashboard and cadence gave executives a clearer line of sight across products. They could see where capacity was being used, where milestones were at risk, and which blockers needed their intervention. Decision speed improved because leaders no longer had to piece together information from multiple sources to understand the state of the portfolio.
Team habits also strengthened. Backlogs stayed in better shape, batch sizes came down, and flow metrics made it easier to spot and address bottlenecks. The organization gained a pattern for scaling agile that was grounded in real teams, real sprints, and a manageable set of governance routines, rather than a purely theoretical framework.
Agile only scales when team cadence, discovery, and portfolio decisions share the same rhythm and use simple, visible metrics that everyone can see.
This work now shapes how Strathen Group helps clients scale agile delivery. Start by fixing team habits and cadence, wire discovery into the same system, and give executives one clear portfolio view that turns ceremonies into decisions.
