Coordination in Agile Product Areas: A Case Study from a Large FinTech Organization

Product teams organized into product areas are becoming more and more prevalent in large-scale agile. While such arrangements are thought to improve the development process and overall product delivery, it is still not clear how this form of organizing alleviates the coordination challenges commonly associated with large-scale agile. In this paper, we report on a case study from a product area in a large FinTech organization. Through analyzing interviews, observations, and strategic documents, we describe how organizing into a product area with vertical and horizontal teams supported inter-team coordination. Further, we describe seventeen coordination mechanisms used in the product area. Our findings have three main contributions. First, we propose that the product area represent a distinct organizational level that can support coordination in large scale development settings. Second, we found that the team types used in the product area represent different team typologies. Third, pull requests and pair programming were used as inter-team coordination mechanisms, and our findings suggest that pair programming to some extent could replace the PR mechanism to further improve product area coordination.