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Art of Agility

Team Roles

As described in the previous section, a Scrum team is a self-organizing, cross-functional group of people working together to achieve a goal. The team includes members in the following roles:

  • Product Owner: The person who maintains the list of desired product changes, including new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. This person has a clear understanding of the product requirements and determines the priority of work for the team.

  • Scrum Master: The person facilitates the daily standup and helps to remove blockers that impede the team’s progress. This person ensures that the team stays focused on their tasks by eliminating interruptions coming from outside of the team. In addition, this person works with the product owner to ensure that the team has a clear understanding of priorities. The scrum master can also be a member of the development team.

  • Development Team: The individuals who do the work required for the product, including software developers, quality engineers, and technical writers.

Within this structure, you have some flexibility regarding who fills these various roles. The product owner role, for instance, needs to be filled by a single individual on the team. But, nothing in the scrum framework dictates who needs to fill that role. Depending on your organization, your product owner might be a Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, or a functional manager. Whoever fills the role needs to be able to assess the business value of the items in the backlog and work with the team to understand the development challenges of those items. The product owner has the ultimate responsibility of setting the priorities, but they cannot do that without working with the team to understand the technical details behind the work.

The scrum master role can be handled by a dedicated scrum master who serves your team (and possibly additional scrum teams), or it can be handled by multiple members of the team that rotate responsibilities while also working as developers. You will have to decide if you find it more beneficial to have the consistency of one person in the scrum master role or if you prefer to share the administrative duties among a larger portion of your team.

The development team is composed of individuals who work on user stories and tasks during the sprint. They participate in each of the scrum ceremonies, including the daily standup where they provide information on what they have completed, what they are currently working on, and whether they have any blockers. The development team also conducts a sprint review where they demonstrate what was built for the current sprint and discuss how it met the goals defined for the sprint.

Communication with fellow team members is critical to the performance of the team.