Aligning five product teams on one integrated increment using the Nexus framework.
Five Scrum teams worked on one product but planned in isolation. Integration happened late and painfully, dependencies surfaced mid-sprint, and "done" meant something different on every team.
The org wanted the benefits of multiple teams without the chaos — a single, integrated, releasable increment every sprint.
Mapped team topology, dependencies, and the real sources of integration pain before changing any process.
Introduced the Nexus framework — a single product backlog, a Nexus Integration Team, and shared events.
Negotiated one definition of done across all five teams so increments were genuinely integratable.
Ran Nexus Sprint Planning to surface dependencies up front and sequence work to minimize integration risk.
Coached Scrum Masters and POs through the first cycles until the rhythm held without intervention.
One ordered product backlog feeds all five teams, owned by a single Product Owner.
A Nexus Integration Team owns integration concerns and a shared definition of done.
Nexus-level planning, review, and retrospective wrap the individual team events.
Dependencies are made visible and sequenced during cross-team planning.
Nexus is deliberately minimal, and that is its strength. The hard part was social, not structural — getting five teams to commit to one definition of done and one backlog order.