Effort with positive impact can best be achieved by ensuring accountability and ownership of strong customer, product, business, and technical vision to guide the scum teams to efficiently meet the right goals.
Together these roles represent the three legs of the stool that facilitate, support, and guide the teams to work in an organized and efficient way. The formalization clarified roles, improved communication, and prevented running in circles when it came to organizing the process to keep the teams synchronized and focused on common business goals. This is nothing new as this role usually exists in development teams in one form or another, but we found it useful to formalize the PL as a specific person for each of the scrum teams. In addition, we felt the need to formalize a third role in each team: the Project Lead (PL). Those are traditional Agile Development roles, and their clear definition worked well for us. We had already been using the roles of Product Owner (PO) and Scrum Master (SM) extensively for years. As a result we had to improve our ability to synchronize and coordinate across teams, and create some additional structure around the daily engineering operations and the development cycle. Having several independent teams has given us the ability to parallelize much of the work we do, and move faster to serve our customers. In Engineering, we formed several teams to build our solutions. As we grow, we are learning to be more adaptive and ensure efficient scaling as things change.