The Specialist Bottleneck: A Real Challenge in Agile Teams
Updated for content and format on May 15, 2025
In many organizations, critical expertise is concentrated in just a few individuals—think technical writers, data architects, security experts, UX designers.
The problem?
There aren’t enough of them to go around.
You can’t embed a UX researcher full-time on ten teams. You can’t ask a database architect to contribute to five parallel projects without sacrificing quality (and sanity). But these skills are still essential to building a great product.
So, what can you do?
✅ Five Realistic Solutions for Handling Specialists in Scrum
1. Cross-Train on Repeatable Activities
Not every task requires deep domain expertise. Look for high-frequency, low-complexity tasks specialists can teach others to handle.
Examples:
Writers offering workshops on maintaining consistent tone and structure
DBAs showing developers how to generate simple views or non-critical triggers
This won’t eliminate the need for specialists—but it will reduce the number of handoffs and interruptions.
2. Shift from Hand-Offs to Pairing for Fast Feedback
Instead of doing the work for the team, have specialists sit down with developers during execution:
Real-time guidance
Immediate course correction
Embedded learning for future autonomy
You can also implement a lightweight review workflow:
Must change
Consider changing
Suggestion for next time
This balances quality with capacity—and grows capability inside the teams.
3. Flag PBIs Early in Refinement to Schedule Specialist Involvement
Train teams to identify Product Backlog Items (PBIs) that will require specialist input. Then, use refinement sessions to flag those items up to two Sprints in advance.
Example: A client I worked with adopted this strategy for user documentation. Teams flagged PBIs with potential documentation impacts. The writers saw the flags, scheduled involvement, and delivered updated docs as the product shipped—eliminating weeks of post-release lag and translation delay.
This is a win for integration, flow, and planning.
4. Protect Focus: Limit Specialists to One Project per Sprint
If a specialist must support multiple teams, never ask them to do it in the same Sprint.
Instead, rotate them:
Sprint 1 → Project A
Sprint 2 → Project B
Sprint 3 → Project C
From the outside, it still looks like progress across multiple initiatives—but internally, the specialist has focus, clarity, and space to deliver well.
If your organization values multitasking over flow, this might feel uncomfortable—but it’s a smarter, more sustainable model.
5. Shorten Sprints to Support Rotating Priorities
To make this model feasible, shorten your Sprint length:
2-week Sprints give specialists a chance to contribute to different teams without getting overwhelmed.
1-week Sprints (while harder to run) can help balance frequent changes in focus.
When work is timeboxed tightly, priorities get sharper—and everyone benefits from faster feedback and less context switching.
🧭 Final Thought: You Can’t Scale Chaos
Throwing a specialist into ten simultaneous team contexts isn’t Agile—it’s a recipe for burnout, delays, and mediocre results.
Instead:
Be intentional about how specialists engage
Use structure, not stress, to improve throughput
Invest in cross-training, forecasting, and focus
These aren’t band-aids. They’re long-term capacity-builders that help your teams and your specialists thrive.
Less thrashing. More flow. Better results. That’s what real agility looks like.
