The coordination between the POTs is accompanied by an Agile Coach across the team – another reason why Agile Coaches should not be part of a team. This synchronisation takes place especially during backlog refinement, maturity and release planning, stage planning, bigroom meetings, POT retro’s or system demos.

For example, for 20 teams there are about 5 POTs with 2-3 people each plus the Chief POT. This results in 15-20 persons. This group needs an Agile coach for itself, who watches over the Agile processes and principles, takes up conflicts and moderates meetings.

The default staffing of a POT is a market representative (POT-M), a technical representative (POT-T) and someone with project management skills (POT-P).At the intermediate level between the Chief POT and the teams, not all roles need to be filled full-time.

The POT must have the ability to take the top level requirements defined by the Chief POT, describe an implementation for the detail level and translate it into a backlog.

The “T” role plays an important role here: the Chief POT is not always able to estimate the (often immense) effort that a product feature causes in a component.

Then it is necessary to weigh up the effort against the importance of the product feature. Therefore, even at the individual team level, it is helpful to have the knowledge of the market available in the team when needed to make these decisions well. Even if not with the full capacity that is necessary in the Chief POT.