A quick guide to Scrum team roles and responsibilities

Scrum teams consist of five to nine members that have the same goals and work towards specific objectives. A typical scrum team is composed of only one scrum master, a product owner, and stakeholders, apart from a group of developers.

In this post, we’ll dive deep into scrum groups ad their successful implementation within your business so you can enhance your work team and your revenue.

We include information about the main three scrum roles and their responsibilities so you can assemble your group for success.

Scrum master

The scrum master is super important for the scrum team because is the one that will coach members and help with the daily development activities that need to be completed.

A scrum master has to ensure that the scrum principles and values are understood by all and that the development team is motivated to participate in projects and collaborate with each other. 

The scrum master has three main responsibilities within the team:

Coaching

Both the product owner and the development team are coached by the scrum master, which also facilitates communication between the teams. 

Apart from this, the scrum master acts as a leader for everyone and a person who team members can talk to when they feel stuck on a certain job or similar.

This scrum master role is super important for the scrum team and each development team member throughout the entire process.

Facilitating

The scrum master is a facilitator, and this involves making key decisions that increase productivity, helping the scrum team, and overall making things “easier” by motivating and coming up with solutions.

Removing impediments

Scrum masters are known for removing impediments team members struggle with. The most important thing for a scrum master is to enhance the productivity of the development team and deliver excellent results.

Product owner

Next on the list of members in a scrum team is the product owner. The product owner is the person who represents the business and is responsible for defining and prioritizing product features. They get the scrum team aligned with the product goals and milestones, basically ensuring everyone’s on the same page, in collaboration with the scrum master’s coaching.

Product owners are constantly keeping in touch with product managers and stakeholders that are outside the team to update the objectives of the project and communicate them to the scrum team.

Typically, a product owner is responsible for ordering the scrum team’s priorities, therefore managing the product backlog. Further, it is the person who sets the product vision for the scrum team and communicates with external sources such as stakeholders to later transmit the information back to the team.

Finally, a product owner makes sure the scrum team is focused on its goals by evaluating the development team members and their progress.

Development team

The development team is a cross-functional team that is responsible for delivering working software. The team is formed by skilled professionals who complete tasks found in a scrum sprint, meaning that members of development teams can be engineers, writers, designers, data analysts, or similar. 

Not all development team members have the same roles and assigned tasks, thus depending on what you need to get done is the team member you’ll call.

The development team’s responsibilities are usually related to testing prototypes and products to ensure their quality is excellent, helping with sprint planning and setting goals for the scrum team, finding the best development practices with the help of data, and helping with programming, designing, and improving products.

Stakeholders

Finally we have internal and external stakeholders that are interested in your product and the outcome. Stakeholders can include customers, sponsors, and executives.

There are different types of stakeholders in scrum teams, and they are:

• Users. People who genuinely use your product in its development stage to help with organization, saving money, and more. Basically, users help to achieve continuous improvement and aid scrum teams to remain focused on what’s important for people based on user stories.
• Executives. Executives are responsible for making key decisions that will impact your product and the scrum team. They receive financial compensation from the product, therefore they want it to succeed.
• Sponsors. Sponsors contribute with financial resources a scrum team needs to develop their product and work within the expected deadline.

Important characteristics of scrum team members

In order to have a successful scrum team, it is important to have the right members. Each member of the team has a specific role and plays an important part in the overall success of the project. The following are some of the most important characteristics of scrum team members:

1. They should have a shared vision and goal.

2. They should be willing to work together closely and collaboratively.

3. They should be open to change and willing to experiment.

4. They should be able to handle ambiguity and uncertainty.

5. They should be able to adapt quickly to new situations.

6. They should be able to work effectively under pressure.

7. They should be able to communicate clearly and concisely.

8. They should be able to think creatively and come up with innovative solutions.

9. They should have a positive attitude and be willing to take on challenges.

10. They should be committed to the success of the team and the project.

Without these values and attitudes, it will be difficult for the team to work together effectively and achieve their goals. Therefore, it is important that each member of the team possesses these characteristics in order to create successful scrum teams.

Conclusion

In this post, we talked about the scrum framework and how scrum teams work, including key scrum roles you should know about.

We included information about scrum masters, product owners, and other scrum roles that are important for project management.

Implementing scrum in your projects can truly help with the overall organization as well as increase business value and revenue.