Team Governance and Roles

Getting teams to solve problems in ways our customers love, focused on and measured by outcomes (rather than output).

Learn about three Product teams that exist inside a tech environment and their objectives in this article. The text broadly explains what Delivery Teams, empowered Product Teams, and Feature Teams are and how they work. We also clearly learn the difference between Product Teams and Feature Teams that are inked to be similar whereas they vary in contrast to the roles of the Product managers.

Autonomy is a critically important concept in agile culture, however ignore its counterbalance - accountability - at your peril.

Organizations are embracing self-governance by passing over the decision-making responsibilities from the executives to the staff working closely with the customers. Edwin Dando argues that the strategy is not yielding great organizational results based on a firm that he encountered. This is because organizations are increasing autonomy but at the same time, failing to balance it with accountability. He notes that the aftermath affects the flow of fatal information from the customers to the executives as those responsible to deliver are not held accountable. Find out more in the text about why autonomy and accountability should work in tandem to achieve better organizational goals.

Addressing the most common myths and misunderstandings around the role and responsibilities of the Scrum Master

In this comprehensive article, Christiann Verwijs dispels various misconceptions around the Scrum Master role. He explores the similarities to a Junior Agile Coach (one that focuses on the team as the Agile Coach focuses on the organization); the 8 stances of the Scrum Master (impediment remover, facilitator, coach, teacher, servant leader, manager, change agent, and mentor); how SM deals with "senior" challenges - or how it manages upward; how it exists in non-scrum agile environments; and how organizations can employ them as agents of continuos change.

A description of each role, their key responsibilities, what each is not in charge of, and how they duties overlap and differentiate.

There is much confusion as to the difference between a Scrum Master and a Project Manager. Some see the Scrum Master as an Agile Project Manager, and figure their responsibilities should be similar. In this article Robbin Shuurman shows that there is almost no overlap between the role of Scrum Master and the position of Project Manager. He dives in to explain the differences, their shared and unique characteristics, and the criteria they're good and not good at.

Is it possible for a group of unhappy people forced to do Scrum to turn themselves into a highly self-motivated, energized, and ideating Kanban team in 30 minutes?

Leise Passer Jensen reiterates based on her own experience how an unhappy team squeezed into Scrum was demotivated and inefficient to deliver while another team she calls the "happy team", leveraged kanban and successfully kept an existing system in the organization in good shape. She argues that using the wrong frameworks that are unfit for the situation is very demotivating and inefficient for teams and there is always a lightweight facilitation principle that can be used to make demotivated teams invent their own effective way of working with their board instead.

A follow-on article addressing many of the questions received about the "Product vs. Feature Teams" article.

Marty Cagan responds to several follow-up questions from his followers through email about Product teams and how they differ from other teams like Delivery teams and Feature teams in this article. Check how he answers the questions in detail through the entire dialog.