Agile Team Structure and Roles: What Makes Up the Dream Team?

Digital transformation – among many others – requires an agile mindset and agile working methodology. Agile working then requires agile teams to bring projects to success. In this video, we discuss the characteristics and composition of the agile dream team, presenting two specialty roles within its operation, illustrated by real-life examples.

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Why it is important to have agile teams in the digital transformation formula? Well, to put it very simply, because such teams drive digital transformation. Companies found in the middle of the process often have to react swiftly to embrace a vast amount of unprecedented change. To accomplish the mission and remain effective, agile teams are required. And now about what those actually are… An agile team is a cross-functional and self-contained working group, meaning that the people in the group can deliver a project without having to rely on anyone else’s expertise outside of the group.

An agile team should not be too large in size. We know that the quality of communication sort of diminishes as the size of the team increases, so that’s why agile teams prefer fewer people in their circles. From this point of view, it’s generally better to have two teams of 5 than one team of 10, for example.

As what concern the activities of agile teams, the following are the most important: defining an increment of value, building it, testing it, and delivering it. All this in a relatively short time frame.

The team itself normally consists of people responsible for creating the products (developers, designers) and people responsible for validating the products (marketers, business analysts). However, in most cases, anyone could be a team member who has valuable knowledge to bring to the team and help to complete the deliverables.

The role of a Scrum Master within an agile team is one specialty role: to facilitate the team, to remove all obstacles out of the way in favour of smooth progression, and to make sure that team members follow those agile practices and processes that were agreed upon between themselves.

The other specialty role would be that of the product owner’s. The product owner is the team member who is in charge of the business side of the project. This role might be the most aligned to the end product because the product owner is the person who represents the interests of the main stakeholder, the one who literally owns the product that the team is working on, so naturally, she or he has to have the clearest understanding of what the stakeholder wants to see. As what concerns a product owner’s responsibilities, the most prominent ones would be to communicate the stakeholders’ vision to the entire team, to make sure that different tasks and processes always follow the right order, and ultimately, to deliver the maximum business value through continuous clarification and motivation within the team. If you ask me, a product owner is just the most logical role to have on your team.

This is how your ideal agile team would look like. But let’s not forget though that agile is an adaptive approach, so you can simply adapt the roles and structures in your teams until they work for everyone.

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