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Home > Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast > Managing Dependencies and Downstream Bottlenecks in Scrum | Renee Troughton
Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
Episode:

Managing Dependencies and Downstream Bottlenecks in Scrum | Renee Troughton
Category: News & Politics
Duration: 00:16:48
Publish Date: 2025-10-15 10:05:00
Description: Renee Troughton: Managing Dependencies and Downstream Bottlenecks in Scrum

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"For the actual product teams, it's not a problem for them... It's more the downstream teams that aren't the product teams, that are still dependencies... They just don't see that work until, hey, we urgently need this."

Renee brings a dual-edged challenge from her current work with dozens of teams across multiple business lines. While quarterly planning happens at a high level, small downstream teams—middleware, AI, data, and even non-technical teams like legal—are not considered in the planning process. These teams experience unexpected work floods with dramatic peaks and troughs throughout the quarter. The product teams are comfortable with ambiguity and incremental delivery, but downstream service teams don't see work coming until it arrives urgently. Through a coaching conversation, Renee and Vasco explore multiple experimental approaches: top-to-bottom stack ranking of initiatives, holding excess capacity based on historical patterns, shared code ownership where downstream teams advise rather than execute changes, and using Theory of Constraints to manage flow into bottleneck teams. They discuss how lack of discovery work compounds the problem, as teams "just start working" without identifying all players who need involvement. The solution requires balancing multiple strategies while maintaining an experimentation mindset, recognizing that complex systems require sensing our way toward solutions rather than predicting them.

Self-reflection Question: Are you actively managing the flow of work to prevent downstream bottlenecks, or are you allowing your "downstream teams" to be repeatedly overwhelmed by last-minute urgent requests?

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