From 1 Scrum team to 7 in 5 months — scaling engineering for digital SaaS.

As Senior Manager for Digital Transformation, the mandate was a stalled 2-year roadmap: deliver across 8 program increments, modernise dental SaaS from EMEA to the Americas, and do it under the regulated-software discipline a medical-device group requires.

1 → 7

Scrum teams

Months to scale

Features in 3 months

15^%

Quality improvement

40^%

Faster PI cycle

95^%

Team retention

The challenge

A 2-year roadmap at risk.

The product roadmap had stalled and the 2-year delivery plan was at risk. Teams were siloed — a Java platform team, a mobile team, a QA team — each carrying its own priorities. Manual testing was the bottleneck, with 30%+ of defects slipping to production.

And the talent gap was structural: one Scrum team, no clear path to scale. Because this is a medical-device group, the new teams had to ship audit-ready from day one — there was no “move fast and clean it up later” path.

The work

Roadmap, then SAFe, then built-in quality.

Architected the 2-year roadmap across 8 PI cycles, with PI planning aligning product, engineering and the C-suite on a single cadence.
Coached the SAFe rollout. Trained teams on Lean Portfolio Management and KPI tracking as the practicing SPC — cutting PI cycle time by 40%.
Hired with discipline, not volume. 6 Java developers and 1 QA automation engineer, onboarded inside 4 months.
Made quality built-in. Automated testing, code-review discipline and security scanning replaced the manual QA bottleneck.
Kept it regulated. SaMD DevOps, threat modelling and a GDPR-aligned, MDR-ready SDLC throughout.

“Scaling engineering isn’t about hiring fast — it’s about clarity, discipline and good process. A small team with SAFe and built-in quality beats a large team fighting tech debt.”
— Swarup Kumar, on the Straumann engagement

Outcomes

What it produced.

7 Scrum teams operational in 5 months — a 300% scaling from a single starting team.
20 high-value features in 3 months — on the new cadence, with code quality up 15% across coverage, security and defect-escape rate.
99% SLA compliance — sustained for 12+ months.
EMEA → Americas expansion — a confident roadmap that attracted key dental-clinic and hospital-network wins.
95% team retention — over 18 months, against an industry average nearer 80%.

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