The 3 Key Roles in an Agile Team
In an agile environment, there's no successful sprint or project without a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ agile team. They have all it takes to achieve big goals within short time frames. How? Everyone in the team knows its power and how to use it. 🧙The end result is achieving big goals without burning out.
An agile team's structure is step one to succeeding at agile development. Take the example of fire brigades. Would a fire brigade put out fires if they didn't have the right members, lieutenant, or captain? The answer is short: nope. The team structure is quintessential.
Therefore, in an agile development process, each member should know what each role involves in the team. Today, we'll go over the roles in an agile team and a few characteristics of great agile teams. But first, we should talk a bit about what an agile team is.
What’s an agile team?
In each development cycle — or sprint — of an agile project, each agile team iterates the product according to customer feedback. That increases the speed of product development 🏃 and the efficiency of that process. And in each iteration, the team releases or launches either a new or improved product functionality.
Agile teams have similar characteristics. They should be:
- Small — 5-6 members
- Focused on hitting the target on time
- Coordinated in terms of task execution
- Conscious of the contribution from each role
- Flexible to allow members to be proactive and excel themselves
- Tolerant of changing customer needs
However, the structure of agile teams depends on the agile framework. For instance, you can have a Scrum team or a Kanban team. And whereas the Scrum-based roles are well-defined, Kanban-based teams are not.
At this point, we should discuss the structure of an agile team. Head over to the next section. 👇
The skeleton of an agile team
An agile team is composed of 3️⃣ main roles. Both teams' and companies' continuous improvement needs to have the right people playing the right role. Let's go over those roles one by one.
Product Owner
The Product Owner is the player with the deepest knowledge of the product. They eat, drink, and breathe the product.
They're the supreme advocates of the product. So, when something isn't right with the product, they should know that quickly. Plus, they know exactly how the product contributes to the company's vision and goals. 🎯
Their communication skills 🎙️ must be top-notch as most of their job requires:
- Triggering the team to engage with and undertake important product developments
- Intervening to adjust that process if and when necessary
- Changing plans if absolutely necessary
- Responding to variable customer needs
In a sprint, the goal is an increment of complete work. At the end of the day, the Product Owner defines and communicates the goals and quality expectations. 📣
The top priority of Product Owners is the customer and customer needs. In that sense, a Product Owner interfaces between the customer and the rest of the team. They also get customer feedback.
The Product Owner also creates and manages the product backlog. Additionally, they review deliverables before product release or launch. 🧐
Bear in mind: The Product Owner aims at maximizing product value. And the only way to achieve that is through teamwork.
Sometimes, in tiny companies, the Product Owner may be the CEO.
Some agile events are especially important for a Product Owner:
- Sprint planning. This agile ceremony’s goal is to prepare the iteration. It’s the right time and place for the Product Owner to present the product backlog to the Team Members and answer their questions.
- Sprint review. That’s the meeting to showcase work done throughout the iteration. The Product Owner gathers feedback from external stakeholders and internal staff and answers their questions. After the review, the Product Owner might adjust the product backlog and release complete product functionality.
Scrum Master
Whereas the Product Owner is product-focused, the Scrum Master is process-focused. They're concerned with:
- Ensuring that the team follows the best agile practices for the context they're working in
- Inspecting the work progress of Team Members daily to make sure they meet the deadlines
- Giving constructive feedback to Team Members on how they're performing
- Safeguarding the time of Team Members so they can dedicate themselves to what delivers the most value
- Getting customer feedback from the Product Owner
- Making sure that the Product Owner is clear about the goal and quality expectations
- Guiding the team throughout the sprint, clarifying any doubts about tasks and their execution
- Motivating Team Members
- Remove any blockage to a Team Members' success
The Scrum Master is also the one who manages the Scrum board. This board should be up-to-date and detailed at all times.
Managers with an extensive resume of successful product development projects are good candidates for Scrum Master. They know from experience where execution can go wrong and what to do to prevent or amend that. They're also great at assessing progress. 📈
Here's how the Scrum Master takes part in agile events:
- Sprint planning. The Scrum Master facilitates this ceremony and participates in effort or story point estimations.
- Daily stand-up. During this meeting, the Scrum Master focuses on clearing all the barriers in the way of the Team Member’s success. And if the development process should change, the Scrum Master will make sure that happens.
- Sprint review. The Scrum Master prepares this event in terms of logistics. When external stakeholders attend the meeting, it must go smoothly.
- Sprint retrospective. During this ceremony, Team Members should discuss what went wrong during the iteration. The Scrum Master should encourage a spirit of sharing and transparency, not only about technical and procedural aspects but also relational issues.
Team Member
These are the ultimate doers. ⛑️ Depending on the type of product, they may be developers, UX designers, and many other kinds of professionals.
Of course, depending on their skills, their role within the team varies. Nevertheless, they're the ones accountable for implementing amazing deliverables on time.
They're usually autonomous and creative, regardless of working together as a group, supporting each other. Actually, Team Members complement each other in terms of skills and experience. ☯️
It's not uncommon to find Team Members discussing ideas on how to work faster and easier. It can be a new tool or a new technique, for instance. And a single Team Member can belong to multiple teams.
Now, what else can we tell you about ideal Team Members?
- They trust and support each other much more. At the same time, they capitalize on each other's strengths and collaborate extensively. In the end, you should notice that the work flows smoothly.
- They learn and mentor one another. One day, a Team Member might teach another, and the day after, they might learn from the member they taught. This is continuous mentoring.
- With a shared skillset, Team Members are better equipped to support each other. They're also better prepared to switch technical specialties if needed.
- Team Members question success and come up with alternative ways of pushing continuous improvement all the time. It's in their 🧬, which means that they can't help it. And that's a great trait, as it's key to continuously growing products.
- Last, Team Members push themselves to deliver the absolute best outcome from an iteration.
Note: Project stakeholders are usually not part of the agile team itself, yet they're part of the overall equation. They might be members of the C suite, marketers, or anyone requesting or reviewing work from the team.
Here are team members' roles during the following agile events:
- Sprint planning. Team Members discuss the product backlog with the Product Owner to decide on the work that they will complete during the iteration.
- Daily stand-up. Every day, Team Members briefly describe the status of their work and what they’ll do next. If they have any blockages, they should ask for help.
- Sprint review. Team Members showcase complete work.
- Sprint retrospective. During this event, Team Members should talk about problems they faced along the iteration. Those can be technical problems, problems with the way they worked or interpersonal problems.
Majestic agile teams
Winning any team challenge would be a nightmare without a carefully thought out structure. Everyone's role in an agile team should be crystal clear. That's the basis for everybody to feel that they're contributing to the goal in a valuable way.
There are no individuals in the daily life of a great agile team. They aim for group success, not individual achievements. An agile team is a group of professionals who work together to achieve sprint goals. Long story short: no teamwork, no agile team.
Want to set your agile team up for success? Check out Easy Agile Programs or Easy Agile User Story Maps.
Related Articles
WorkflowHow to set your Agile teams up for success
Agile is about empowering teams to take ownership, feel truly engaged, and foster a culture of collaboration. More than ever, teams are required to deliver with greater adaptability, speed, and engagement. The future is more ambiguous and complex, and Agile teams must know how best to respond to these changing conditions.
Agile experts John Walpole, Dean MacNeil, and Nick Muldoon share their success formula behind the high-functioning Agile teams at Lyft, Valiantys, and Easy Agile. You will learn:
- How to create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind
- How to empower your teams
- The qualities of high-performing Agile teams
Create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind
I think Agile is not a silver bullet. We have people who look at Agile and say, "Oh, well, this is going to solve all of our woes." And it's not; it's certainly not a turnkey thing.
Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO at Easy Agile
Agile is not a silver bullet. It is not a methodology that will solve leaders, teams and individuals' problems. Agile is a continuous improvement journey of "adaptability in evolutionary theory; it's about responding to either a new environment or changes in your environment to again, not just survive but to thrive," said Dean.
Set your Agile teams up for success by teaching them to thrive by empowering them to lead change, make mistakes, build a solid foundation, and be open to learning, changing, and communicating the meaningful 'why' behind their work. You will see an explosion in Agile team success when you have a "cohesive team aligned to a common mission with a growth mindset."
Motivate your Agile teams by connecting their work with a meaningful 'why.' Schedule a meeting to ensure you constantly discuss their work's more profound purpose. Bring up a real-life customer example. John shared, "At Lyft, we share stories in a fortnightly meeting. We offer free accessible rides to those in wheelchairs or those who struggle to pay for a ride but need access to transportation to get to work or school.
"Bring your personas to life with these real-life examples, so it's front and center in your employee's minds," said John.
Empowering your teams
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Peter Drucker
Your employees need to lead the change. "If you look at great leaders in recent Agile transformations, you might want to look at a company like Porsche," said Dean. Dean shares how Porsche has inspired Valiantys because "every employee at Porsche is leading the change. So they're all bought into it; they all have that sense of leadership to drive it.". Porsche's employees are leading the change because their leadership communicates the 'why' well. "Fun is number one when their CIO lists off the top three reasons 'why' everyone is so fired up about the Agile transformation. Because you can have fun on the job, your job is not supposed to be a grim duty. It's supposed to be something you look forward to."
"Empower your teams to make mistakes," said John.
Empower your Agile teams to fail and make mistakes through powerful questions. Leaders have to change their tone from "oh no, who do I fire?" to "what's the challenge? What can I do to help?". Express to your team that you're on a journey to learn as much as they are. In doing so, the leader humanizes themselves and becomes more vulnerable.
Leadership sets the tone. As a company scales, the responsibility to create the culture and the risk appetite falls more on leadership.
Qualities of high-performing, Agile teams
1. Create a solid foundation
Set your Agile team up for success with a stable team unit. Don't keep moving teams around; create long-term Agile teams to allow individuals to get to know each other and humanize one another. "I think stability is key to having the tacit knowledge keeping together and this open mindset where they're willing to learn; I love that," said Nick.
2. Open to learning and adapting
For Agile teams to continuously improve, they must constantly be learning and adapting. "You can't get that learning and adaptation if you keep just stirring the pot. Because you're going to keep scattering that knowledge, you want to take hold, and then, of course, you want to spread the knowledge to the organization then," said Dean.
3. Share feedback and do the retrospective
Ensure your Agile teams are demonstrating working product on a regular occurrence. If you're practicing Scrum, make sure you are doing the weekly sprint review. This allows the team to receive feedback from stakeholders and keep iterating and moving forward, ensuring they stay in movement. "Do your retrospective," said Dean." We're looking at what we delivered, and now we're going to look at how we delivered it." It is imperative that Scrum teams gather at the end of each sprint to discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what can be improved on for next time. Otherwise, you invite complacency and stagnation into your Scrum process — the antithesis of Agile.
Using Easy Agile to set your Agile teams up for success
Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports your team's Agile practices in Jira. The user story map format in TeamRhythm transforms your flat product maps into a dynamic and flexible visual representation of work. Watch the highlights tour to see how Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes sprint planning, managing your backlog, and team retrospectives easier. Visit Atlassian Marketplace to start your free, 30-day trial today.
Agile Best PracticeSix Tips for Improving Team Collaboration
The 17th State of Agile Report shared that 93% of executives thought that their teams could do the same amount of work in half the time, if their teams collaborated better.
That's quite a statistic. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this reflects a lack of efficiency due to poor collaboration, or a disconnect between leadership expectations and the realities faced by development teams.
What we do know is that improving team collaboration has benefits and that improved collaboration is a key benefit of effective agile practices.
So if you think your team could work more effectively, here are six tips for improving team collaboration that we think will make your working life better, and help you deliver for your customers.
1. Agile Teams Are Cross-Functional
Cross-functional teams are the backbone of agile collaboration. It's Agile 101:
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Ideally, your agile team should be able to deliver work independently. The skills and expertise of your team should allow you to handle diverse tasks without creating dependencies on other teams. You can take ownership of the software you're delivering.
The benefit of organizing into cross-functional teams is a greater shared understanding of your project, where you can each see how the pieces fit together. This type of collaboration supports the efficient flow of work and ensures that knowledge and skills are consistently shared.
2. Take an Iterative Approach
Or to put it another way, make it easier to fail fast, so your team can learn why, and correct your course. By breaking down large projects into manageable increments, your team can focus on delivering small, functional parts of working software at regular intervals. This approach goes hand-in-hand with continual feedback from users, ensuring that issues are uncovered quickly and dealt with just as fast. This shared team focus on user feedback, and the shared purpose and collaboration that comes with it, is a key benefit of agile development.
3. Maintain Regular and Transparent Communication
Daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and planning meetings are all designed to foster regular and clear communication. You and your team should see these meetings as an opportunity to share ideas, discuss progress and blockers, and collaborate. If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.
If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.
Someone who has wasted too much time in shopping-list meetings.
Beyond team meetings, clear communication is important anywhere the details of your work are shared. Agile tools like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provide a central platform for prioritizing work and tracking progress. With a central source of truth that everyone can access to understand goals, priorities, and team commitment, collaboration can be more effective, keeping the team aligned and focused.
4. Conduct Team Retrospectives
Hot take: regular retrospectives are the most important agile practice your team can adopt.
Team retrospectives provide a structured opportunity to reflect on your work and discuss how it can be done better next time. This is team-led improvement because you and your team are in the driver's seat. Encouraging honest and open discussions during retrospectives helps build trust among team members and fosters a collaborative mindset. By continuing to work on processes and behaviors, you and your team can improve your performance over time and make your working life better.
5. Use Collaboration Tools
The right tools can make a big difference in team collaboration. The best tools provide a reliable source of truth that the whole team can access, in a place where the whole team will access it. It's a simple concept; a shared understanding of the work is supported by shared and willing access to the same information.
Choose a tool that makes it easy for you and your team to access information and keep it updated. If you're already working in Jira, an integration like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides a better view of your work in a story map format, with goals, objectives, and team commitment all made clear. Team retrospective boards are attached to each sprint (or spun up as required for Kanban teams) so you have your team-led ideas for improvement tightly connected to the work in Jira.
No matter which tool you choose, make sure it will facilitate better alignment, streamline your workflows, and provide a clear picture of roadblocks and progress. By using collaboration tools effectively, your team stays organized, focused, and connected, no matter where each member is located.
6. Build a Positive Team Culture
It may sound obvious, but a positive team culture is essential for effective collaboration. Creating an environment where team members feel valued, respected, and motivated, encourages the psychological safety they need to share their great ideas, learn from missteps, and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.
High-performing teams recognize the achievements of others, share constructive feedback, and support practices that lead to a healthy work-life balance. Make it regular, and keep it authentic. A positive culture not only improves team dynamics but also boosts overall productivity and job satisfaction.
Successful Team Collaboration
Effective collaboration can be the difference between your team achieving their goals, or falling short. By embracing agile practices like the regular communication that comes from agile planning meetings, to the learnings that come from taking an interactive approach to development, and creating time for team-led improvement with retrospectives, you can seriously boost your team dynamics.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm Supports Team Collaboration
Easy Agile TeamRhythm is designed to make your agile practices more accessible and effective, helping your team plan, prioritize, and deliver work with better alignment and clarity.
Built around a story map for visualizing work and retrospective boards that encourage team-led improvement, TeamRhythm facilitates sprint and release planning, dependency management, backlog management, user story mapping, and retrospectives.
Tight integration with Jira makes Easy Agile TeamRhythm a reliable source of truth, no matter where you and your team members are located.
Watch a demo, learn about pricing, and try for yourself in our sandbox. Visit the Easy Agile TeamRhythm Features and Pricing page for more.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm
WorkflowShould you form cross-functional agile teams?
Should you form cross-functional agile teams?
In large, conventional organizations, multiple departments manage specific functions. Marketing, finance, HR and sales teams work in silos, often focused on their own outcomes rather than being primarily driven by the customer and the market.
Yet even before the pandemic hit, organizations recognized the need to manage change and make decisions quicker than ever before to keep up with competitors. Along came covid, and those needs vastly intensified.
To thrive in an uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, many organizations are moving away from silos and racing towards enterprise agility, forming networks of empowered cross-functional agile teams.
But the change from siloed departments to agile teams means change, and change can be difficult.
In this article we weigh up the pros and cons of each operating model.
Key points
- Communication, collaboration, and employee engagement are often better in cross-functional teams.
- By iteratively testing solutions quickly, cross-functional teams can boost productivity, cut costs, and deliver better results.
- There may be bumps along the road before a newly formed cross-functional team matures and reaches its potential, but you can take steps to help them succeed.
"The two most urgent reasons for adopting Agile are the speed and flexibility required by working environments that continue to be bother unpredictable and volatile." State of Agile Report
What are cross-functional agile teams?
Cross-functional agile teams (sometimes known as cross-functional scrum teams) are a key element in any organization’s agile development.
The team brings together people from across the business with different expertise and skillsets. Together, the team works toward a common goal.
Usually made up of 5 to 11 people, the team defines, builds, tests and delivers projects in sprints or iterations.
"The ability for the team to support each other, collaborate with each other and align to the goal are wonderful ways to measure agile."
William Rojas, Adaptavist
What are the benefits of cross-functional agile teams?
There are many benefits of having cross-functional agile teams in your organization. Here’s our top five.
1. Cross-functional teams communicate and collaborate better
Siloed teams can spend many hours a week in unproductive meetings as they negotiate resources and manage conflicting priorities. On the other hand, Agile teams align on goals and objectives from the beginning of each project. This helps make their subsequent meetings brief, productive and transparent. Each person is accountable and empowered to share progress and solve problems. As a result, agile teams are often more engaged and passionate about their work.
2. Cross-functional teams are responsive
In silos, each team is responsible for an aspect of a project with limited visibility into what other teams are doing. This can lead to blockers or conflicting priorities, creating rework and delays. They may also find they lack specific skills as the project goes on, leaving teams rushing to fill the gaps and causing further delays. Moving to agile teams means having the necessary skills and resources available, as well as identifying conflicting priorities and blockers early. This helps agile teams rapidly iterate, continually improve, and deliver results.
3. Cross-functional teams are innovative
In siloed organizations, employees can get caught up in their departmental group think. The limited exposure to other teams makes employees less likely to question established practises or suggest improvements. In cross-functional agile teams, perspectives from people across multiple teams are shared from the outset. Because people from different skills approach problems in different ways, this can lead to great ideas and business innovation.
4. Cross-functional teams help the business adapt to change
With their iterative approach and frequent communication, cross-functional agile teams can problem solve and change directions fast. They don’t face the renegotiation, reprioritization, and delays that can hold siloed teams back. Instead, businesses with cross-functional teams can better respond to changing market and customer needs.
5. Cross-functional teams consistently focus on the big picture
Cross-functional agile teams understand the ‘why’ behind the work they’re doing, and they come together with a focus on the customer experience. This shared focus dissolves the barriers between the different functions within the team. Deliverables are mapped to high-level business objectives which deliver greater value to the end-user.
What are the downsides of cross-functional agile teams?
If cross-functional teams are done right, there really are no downsides. What organization doesn’t want increased collaboration, innovation, customer focus and faster delivery?
That said, there can be bumps and conflict as people learn to adapt to the agile mindset – and this is where cross-functional teams can fail to deliver. Here are some of the common challenges large organizations face when moving to cross-functional agile teams:
- Cultural resistance with people reluctant to let go of the old way of doing things.
- No clear accountability, leaving teams unable to make quick decisions and people clinging to a sense of ownership over their work.
- Lack of alignment with goals which can lead to misunderstandings, rework, and potential conflict.
With this in mind, it may take a little time and support for a newly formed agile team to find its wings.
"Often the way teams become agile is just by doing it, trying it, and continuing to evolve and committing to that approach. So, if you haven't started - just get started. That's often the biggest struggle."
William Rojas, Adaptavist
The first step is to just get started
Being agile means changing an organization’s processes and people structure, and it can seem like a lot of hard work. But if businesses don’t transform so they can capture the productivity, speed, customer, and employee engagement benefits; they’re at risk of being left behind.
Cross-functional agile teams can be your key adapting fast and getting ahead. There’s no doubt they can deliver outstanding results – if you take the right steps to set them up for success.
For concrete advice on how to drive successful cross-functional agile teams and avoid failure, sign up for our free on-demand webinar - ‘Do’s and Don'ts of Agile Teams with Adaptavist’.
The webinar will take a deep dive into the SAFe agile team together with our partner and SAFe expert Adaptavist.
Keen to scale agile and form successful cross-functional teams?
Come along to a free, 40-minute on-demand webinar to find out how