Roles & Responsibilities
Product teams work in a way where the delivery team agrees to deliver on a promise. Together, they have the responsibility to fullfil that promise, but how they organize in a way to execute on that promise is up to them.
Traditionally, agile scrum teams organize are made up of the product owner and the development team. However, teams should be oriented in such a way that the team members can self-organize to accomplish the task. Additionally, teams should be cross-functional to help support one another and learn from one another to complete work items. (source)
"Nothing is more effective than a cross-functional team with a well-defined backlog." - Dominica DeGrandis
Development Team¶
Redefining a developer. The development team is composed of the people doing the engineering and development. They are empowered to self-organize and manage their work, optimizing their effectiveness and efficiency. This empowers the people closest to the work to do what’s needed to solve the problem. The developer role means a team member who has the right skills, as part of the team to do the work, including designers, writers, programmers. Although there are different skill sets present across team members, together they form a unified cross-functional team.
The development team’s responsibilities include:
- Delivering the work through the sprint.
- To ensure transparency during the sprint they meet daily at the daily standup.
Product Owner¶
Setting clear direction. Agile teams are, by design, flexible and responsive, and it is the responsibility of the product owner to ensure that they are delivering the most value. The business is represented by the product owner who tells the development team what is important to deliver. Trust between these two roles is crucial.
The product owner should not only understand the customer, but also have a vision for the value that the team is delivering to the customer. The product owner also balances the needs of other stakeholders in the organization.
The product owner's responsibilities include:
- Managing the scrum backlog - Ultimately they are responsible for the backlog that the development team pulls in to deliver. That means the product owner should know about everything that is in the backlog and other people that add items to the product backlog should ensure that they communicate with the product owner.
- Stakeholder management - Any product will have many stakeholders involved ranging from users, customers, governance and organizational leadership. The product owner will have to work with all these people to effectively ensure that the development team is delivering value.
EBA¶
Holding it all together. Some teams may have a EBAs (engineering business analysts) who are responsible for gluing everything together and ensuring that the scrum team is operating well and able to accomplish work. In practical terms, that means they help the product owner define value, the development team deliver the value, and the scrum team to get better.