Scaling Scrum: From an 8‑Person Team to a Hundred‑Person R&D Workflow

In 2015 Worktile adopted Scrum for a small R&D team; before that, no standard agile framework was used because the team was tiny and their own collaboration tools were sufficient.

When the second product, Lesschat, was launched, both Worktile (the basic version) and Lesschat required continuous updates, raising the question of how to prioritize work.

The company created an independent 8‑person Scrum team for Lesschat, assigning a dedicated product owner and Scrum Master, and established a Scrum work agreement covering product backlog, two‑week Sprint cycles, meeting schedules, code submission methods, and story‑point standards.

Step 1: Scrum Team Kick‑off Meeting – Terry was appointed PO and Shaun Xu as Scrum Master; the team drafted a Scrum agreement.

Step 2: Run the First Sprint – The team held a planning meeting on Monday, daily stand‑ups at 10 am, a sprint review on Friday afternoon, a retrospective, and deployed the increment on Tuesday night.

Step 3: Bi‑weekly Improvement Cycle – The habit of two‑week Sprints has been maintained, revealing many early problems such as inaccurate story estimation, API bottlenecks for mobile, emergency tasks disrupting plans, and stand‑up meetings becoming perfunctory.

Through continuous retrospectives the team adopted engineering best practices like simple design, test‑driven development, CI/CD, and gradually refined their workflow.

As the market evolved, the team faced two major challenges: splitting the product suite into micro‑services and scaling agile across a growing team. They experimented with focusing each Sprint on a single sub‑product (e.g., Calendar, Cloud Drive), but this proved too slow for customers.

To achieve business‑level agility, the organization introduced a three‑layer agile model:

Team‑level agile : building self‑organizing, efficient Scrum teams.

Business‑level agile : scaling R&D through coordinated objectives, quarterly planning, and cross‑team integration.

Organization‑level agile : using market research and data‑driven validation to set direction.

The implementation process includes market research, demand assessment, quarterly R&D goal setting, feature breakdown by product owners, sprint planning by each Scrum team, weekly syncs, integration testing, and delivery to UAT.

Data analysis showed that over 50 % of the company’s customers were in R&D scenarios, prompting the 2018 decision to build Worktile 8.0 (later rebranded as PingCode) as a dedicated R&D management platform, with a self‑developed continuous delivery system enabling lightweight CI/CD for all Scrum teams.

By 2020 the platform was renamed PingCode, focusing on enterprise R&D customers while Worktile continued serving collaboration needs, demonstrating the organization’s ability to adapt its agile practices across product, engineering, operations, and even HR.