Building Agile Teams: Project vs Product

All you need to know, to make the right decision.

When building agile teams, organizations have a choice whether to build flexible project based teams or fixed product based teams. There is no right or wrong between the two choices. It really depends on the situation and the long-term vision of the Product/Solution. Let’s compare the pros and cons of both types and discuss what factors need to be considered.

Project Based Teams

Teams that are created to accomplish short-term goals in a defined timeframe. Based on their skills and expertise, engineers are aligned with appropriate scrum teams. Once the goals are accomplished teams are dispersed to create new teams to accomplish new goals.

The picture below shows an example of an Engineering group restructuring scrum teams as goals change from Q1 to Q2.

Project based teams work best for :

• Consulting/Contract work.
• Technical work that requires little or no domain knowledge
• Teams that won’t have a need to scale.