A Quick Guide to Members of a Tech Team

You’ll find that tech teams often follow the same blueprint for how their teams are structured and organised, although there’s definitely some wiggle room. In general, the team will consist of Delivery, Business and Product, Engineering and Design; these groups are not siloed and often work very closely with each other.

The structure of a typical tech team

Delivery, Business and Product

The Delivery, Business and Product group has a mixture of roles. In general, they’re there to provide the smooth delivery of a product and provide a path to the client.

Product Owner

• The Product Owner knows the service inside out, and is responsible for ensuring the product aligns to that service.
• If the tech team is not in-house, i.e they’ve been contracted to do the work, then the Product Owner will be provided by the client. They are the path to the client and stakeholders.
• The Product Owner signs off work — this is normally listed in the team’s definition of done for tickets.
• The Product Owner also owns the backlog of work to do, and decides on priorities.

Scrum Master/Delivery Manager

• The Scrum Master is in charge of creating a successful agile environment for the team to work in, and coaching the team to be more agile.
• Scrum ceremonies* are facilitated by the Scrum Master.
• The Scrum Master protects the team from themselves; often teams can attempt to promise too much or too little in Sprint Planning. The Scrum Master is there to make sure that the sprint objective is clear, and the sprint aim is achievable.
• The Scrum Master also protects the team from external influences; this includes blockers from other teams.
• Stakeholder management and engagement is also handled by the Scrum Master, they bring the stakeholders into the project, and manage their expectations.
• The Scum Master helps the Product Owner to organise the backlog of work.
• If the role includes managing risks and governance, this role can be called a Delivery Manager. An example of where this is found is often in UK Government tech teams.

Business Analyst (BA)

• BAs work closely with the Scrum Master, Product Owner and Design group to translate product requirements into tickets for the Engineering group.
• The product requirements are written as user stories, and the BAs ensure that the ticket contains the necessary acceptance criteria.

Design

The Design group works very close together to create the vision of the product. Sometimes more than one person covers multiple roles, and sometimes these team members are provided by the client.

User Experience Designer (UX)

• A UX role can vary greatly, but in general the purpose of the role is to design a product that will provide a great experience for the user.
• A UX designer often uses prototyping or wireframes to create the vision of the product.
• Sometimes a UX designer has standards that they have to work to. For example, in the UK Government, website must be made to the Government Design Standard (GDS).

User Research (UR)

• URs interview potential users to gather requirements, or to demonstrate a prototype and receive feedback.
• The UR then uses the information gathered from target users to aid the design of the product. The whole purpose of this role is to make sure the product is fit for the users.

Iteraction designer

• In general, an Interaction Designer designs the behaviour of an interactive system fit for the users.

Engineering

The Engineering group is where the implementation of the work takes place. They are also in charge of ensuring quality and reliability through testing.

Tech lead

• The Tech Lead guides the technical direction and the Engineering team.
• Technical decisions are made by the Tech Lead with the help of the tech team.
• The Tech Lead works closely with the Scrum Master and Product Owner to understand objectives and priorities.

Engineers

• Engineers are in charge of implementing the acceptance criteria of user stories; this work will usually also include writing tests.
• There is a wider range of different types of engineer, including: front-end, back-end, devops, cloud, data science, full stack. Within these different roles, there are is abundance of frameworks and languages that Engineers can specialise in, although often Engineers will be able to work using multiple technologies.
• Engineers help to size tickets in Sprint Planning/Backlog Refinement*.
• Engineers will often work in test driven development (TDD); Engineers write the tests for the implementation, and then implement the change until the tests pass.

Quality Assurance Engineer (QA)

• A QA is a tester; their role is to ensure that the acceptance criteria in the ticket is met in the implementation. Sometimes their role sits more in the Delivery, Business and Product group.
• Tickets will come to the QA after being worked on by an Engineer. The QA will then perform their testing. There is wide variety in how this is done; it can involve manual testing, checking tests written by the Engineer, or writing tests themselves.
• Usually, sign-off by the QA will be a part of the definition of done for the ticket.
• QAs often produces documentation such as test reports or scripts.
• Different types of tests that can be written for code include: functional testing, unit testing, regression testing, end to end testing and accessibility testing.

By Sarah Littlejohn

*If you’d like to read more about Scrum Ceremonies, here’s a quick guide to running them successfully: https://medium.com/@softwaresisterz/a-quick-guide-to-successful-scrum-ceremonies-b6c5fccdd33f