When assigning Scrum roles within your organization’s departments, it’s important to match the responsibilities and skills required for each Scrum role to the typical positions and expertise found in each department. Here’s how you can approach it, along with practical examples for each department:
Primary Accountability: Maximizing the value delivered by the Scrum Team.
Owns the Product Vision: Clearly communicates the product’s vision, strategy, and goals to the team and stakeholders.
Manages the Product Backlog: Creates, orders, and maintains the product backlog, ensuring it is transparent, visible, and understood by all.
Prioritizes Work: Decides what the team should work on next by setting priorities based on business value, stakeholder input, and customer needs.
Represents Stakeholders: Acts as the voice of the customer and balances the needs of all stakeholders.
Defines Acceptance Criteria: Specifies what “done” means for each backlog item and accepts or rejects work results.
Decision-Maker: Makes final decisions on the product backlog and is accountable for the value of the team’s output.
Typical Stances: Visionary, Collaborator, Customer Representative, Decision Maker, Experimenter, Influencer.
Primary Accountability: Ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted effectively within the team and organization.
Servant Leader: Facilitates Scrum events (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective) and ensures they are productive and time-boxed.
Coach and Mentor: Coaches the team, Product Owner, and organization on Scrum theory and practices; helps the team become self-managing and cross-functional.
Removes Impediments: Identifies and removes obstacles that hinder the team’s progress, whether technical, organizational, or interpersonal.
Protects the Team: Shields the team from external distractions and interruptions, enabling focus on sprint goals.
Promotes Continuous Improvement: Encourages regular reflection and adaptation, fostering a culture of learning and process improvement.
Supports Collaboration: Facilitates collaboration between the Product Owner, Developers, and stakeholders, ensuring clear communication and alignment.
Typical Stances: Servant Leader, Facilitator, Coach, Mentor, Teacher, Impediment Remover, Change Agent.
Primary Accountability: Delivering a potentially shippable product increment at the end of each sprint.
Developers are also known as.
Doers
Performers
Contributors
Team Members
Specialists
Operators
Implementers
Remember that the team members are the ones with the accountability of deliverying value and does not necessasrily mean that his is about writing code.
Sprint Planning: Collaborates to create a plan for the sprint (Sprint Backlog) and commits to the sprint goal.
Increment Delivery: Designs, builds, tests, and delivers product increments that meet the Definition of Done.
Daily Adaptation: Inspects progress daily (in the Daily Scrum), adapts plans, and self-organizes to achieve the sprint goal.
Quality Assurance: Ensures all work meets agreed standards and acceptance criteria.
Collaboration: Works closely with other team members, the Product Owner, and the Scrum Master to solve problems and deliver value.
Continuous Improvement: Participates in retrospectives and helps identify ways to improve team performance and product quality.
Key Attributes: Cross-functional, self-organizing, committed to the sprint goal, and accountable for the quality and delivery of the work.
Instructions
As a group, select a project that you will use for this activity.
Based on the chosen project, assign among yourselves who will take on the roles of Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Team Member.
Make sure each role is clearly identified and agreed upon by everyone in the group.
More instructions on the workbook
Drop your answers on your APM Workbook.