Driving Enterprise Agile & Product Transformation at Sony PlayStation

Context / Challenge:

From 2016 to 2020, I served as Digital Transformation Leader at Sony PlayStation, heading Agile practices across 125 Scrum and Kanban teams worldwide.

Sony PlayStation, with globally distributed teams and a rapidly evolving market, was preparing for major milestones including the PlayStation 5 launch. Leadership faced challenges with:

Siloed execution between Product, Design, and Engineering.
Long handoffs creating bottlenecks across teams.
Lack of alignment at scale between executives, senior managers, and delivery teams.
Limited visibility into high-value impediments blocking delivery.

The stakes were high — PlayStation needed to improve collaboration and agility to maintain its edge in the competitive global gaming market.

My Role & Approach

As Enterprise Agile & Product Coach, I partnered with executives, senior leaders, and teams across multiple business units to reset delivery foundations and embed Agile practices at scale.

Executive Alignment & Coaching

Partnered with the VP of Engineering and senior directors to reset delivery expectations and foster cross-functional collaboration.
Took the VP of Engineering to a Scrum@Scale workshop led by Jeff Sutherland, embedding powerful practices such as Impediment Boards that exposed high-ROI impediments beyond team control.

Product & Team Coaching

Coached product managers, designers, and engineers on backlog refinement, story slicing, and outcome-driven delivery.
Replaced handoffs with visual collaboration methods (story mapping, dependency boards) to align teams on value flow.

Thought Leadership at Scale

Invited Jeff Patton to engage directly with PlayStation’s senior leaders and executives. Together, we helped them confront scaling challenges and co-create strategies to address them.
Facilitated leadership workshops to embed Agile ways of working into strategic decision-making and roadmap planning.

Visual Planning & Transparency

Introduced PI Planning boards and flow visuals to improve transparency and reduce bottlenecks across global teams.

Key Outcomes

Enterprise Alignment → Product, Design, and Engineering achieved alignment, improving collaboration and eliminating costly handoffs.
Leadership Visibility → Executives gained visibility into the most important work, enabling faster prioritization and obstacle removal.
Faster, Outcome-Driven Delivery → Teams shifted from output-focused execution to delivering measurable outcomes, accelerating release cycles.
Scaling Practices → Introduction of Scrum@Scale and Jeff Patton’s product thinking embedded powerful scaling practices into leadership culture.
Business Impact → The PlayStation 5 launch was named one of TIME Magazine’s “Top 10 Coolest Products of 2020”, a testament to the organization’s ability to deliver world-class products on time.

Next Steps / Sustainability

Leadership and teams continued applying Agile practices after my engagement, supported by internal champions.
The impediment management model and visual planning tools became part of PlayStation’s operating system for scaling.

TESTIMONIALS

Amit is an authentic and passionate Agilest who brings a great depth of knowledge to his work. It was a pleasure working with him at Molson Coors developing the Agile culture there. I would recommend him to anyone looking to grow their Agile understanding in the correct direction.

I have worked with Amitabh (Amit) for around 3 years now at Sony Interactive Entertainment. He has made multiple trips from his office is San Francisco to San Diego to work directly with my scrum teams on Agile and Scrum best practices, evaluations and provides personalized recommendations to my teams. Amit will fully embed himself in a scrum team for a sprint, going to all of the ceremonies (stand ups, grooming sessions, sprint planning, sprint demos and retrospectives) when he has a visit. He also spearheaded the Sony Interactive Entertainment Co Op group to share and standardize best Agile practices across all of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s locations, his work in this effort has reached hundreds of people in the organization.

I have been an Agile advocate practicing Scrum for 12 years, a certified Scrum Master for over 5 years and a Software Engineering Manager for a little over 2 years. Amit’s training sessions and visits with the teams are very valuable and beneficial to all involved. He’s great at identifying areas for improvement as well as championing team happiness. Amit is the most passionate Agile individual that I have met to date, he brings Agile methodologies into all areas of his life. He is very personable, friendly, proactive, influential and detail oriented. In his time at Sony Interactive Entertainment, I have already seen good transformations at a global company level which I have not seen from any Agile coach previously.

With all that said, I am happy to give Amit my highest recommendation for an Agile/Scrum Coach towards his CTC certification. I cannot think of any person more capable and deserving of this prestigious certification.

I am grateful to Amitabh for coaching and transforming one of my scrum teams at Sony PlayStation. The team benefitted tremendously during the two sprints that Amit spent as an embedded team coach. The team now brings a strong rigor to scrum ceremonies and sprint planning is now a highly collaborative group exercise. The daily standups have transformed from a previously monotonous status sharing meeting to daily team building event around an organized task board with team members providing thoughtful participation and stepping up to counsel and offer help to a colleague in need — all led by a scrum master as the servant leader. Team velocity is now distinctly more predictable and consistent from sprint to sprint. These two sprints were perhaps the most intense sprints for the team, but in the process Amit transformed a good team into a great one. Thank you Amit!

Amitabh has trained and formed me as a PO in my organization. While I have recently attended a formal training from Ken Rubin in the role of scrum PO, I had a more hands-on introduction through day-by-day interaction and coaching by Amitabh. By the time it came to the formal training I was familiar with most concepts and had opinions on what I thought works well and what I thought does not work well for me.

In addition to the deep scrum knowledge and experience that Amitabh brings to his coaching, he also brings the spiritual and human behavioral underpinnings of scrum to life. He was able to convey the inspiration behind scrum in a way that was instinctively understandable to me and my team – especially the concepts of safety and of trust. He was also able to convey the value of the special and complementary relationship that is the Scrum Master / Product Owner duality. I have matured in my PO role as a result of his coaching.