Bridging the Gap: Scrum and Agile Development as it relates to the 7 Roles
Written by a Luminary & Prophet & ex-PO.
I love Scrum and I adore Agile methodologies!..well more honestly, I love what Scrum does for teams. Who loves refinement?! Anyways.. For those of you that have no clue what Scrum or Agile mean, it is a way to organize your team for rapid development and rapid iteration. You can read more at (Agile development and Scrum). At first glance, you might say, “This is only for software engineering teams!” Although these methodologies are typically used in software teams, they are useful to any team trying to be effective and self organizing.
In brief, Scrum gives you two deliverables:
- An organization of structure and tasks across a team
- A set of “ceremonies” (meetings) that the team should use to be most effective
This blog post breaks down the first deliverable with the 7 Roles Framework as well as where each Role might be most effective to play in different tasks and meetings. In a future post, I will break down what roles you should ‘lean into’ with different scrum/agile ceremonies as well as where Roles may cause natural and necessary friction in a scrum team. ;)
To begin, let’s lay out how scrum works. In the simplest terms (though this changes depending on the product/organization) a scrum team has a PO (A product owner), a Scrum Master, a Technical Lead and a set of developers. Let’s walk through the roles of each member.
The PO (Product Owner)
The PO is in charge of the product’s direction and success. This means they understand the market the product is in, sets the direction of the product, owns stakeholder and collaborator relationships, tracks success and metrics around the product and in general is the ‘face’ of the product. Think of a PO as a mini-CEO of a sub portion of the company.
The Scrum Master
The Scrum Master sets the tempo of the team, organizes the work, and builds an environment that is conducive to an effective team. They also work on building up the trust on the team as well as efficient processes.
Technical Lead
The technical lead takes the vision and direction of the product, and breaks it down from a technical perspective. The technical lead works to take the POs idea of the product and guides the effort into making it happen (or telling the PO why it can’t happen). They take the idea and put it into motion by figuring out how the vision can actually come about.
Development Team (including the technical lead).
The development team takes the “how” from the technical lead and Implements the vision into a reality. They are the ones who actually build the product.
Ok phew, that was a lot of intro!
Depending on how comfortable you are with the roles you might be able to spot a couple of places where the Roles directly relate to scrum (go you!). You may start to think: is there a ‘perfect’ Roleset for each of these titles? The answer here is a no! The relationship to scrum from the roles is in title only. You can find POs/Scrum Masters/Developers who play any combination of the roles. This is meant to draw corollaries to the job descriptions, not the people.
Now, let’s relate each scrum role to the Seven Roles.
On its face, the PO plays the Prophet role regularly by coming up with the vision and giving the team a ‘North Star’. Additionally, it is very common to see POs who are strong in Luminary, Conceptualizer and/or Investor. This is because they are usually the face of the product and need to maintain a large network of stakeholders and customer relationships. They also need to understand the market they are in, and see and create a product with long term value.
Conversely, the key roles played by the scrum master is the Team Builder and the Organizer Role. This is because the Scrum Master is responsible for making sure the team is connected and communicating well as well as building an effective working process for the team as well as holding them accountable to those processes. Being able to read the sentiment (Team Builder) in the room is crucial for them to even know there is a problem or be able to brainstorm a solution.
The technical lead plays the Conceptualizer and the Implementor role most frequently. This is because they need to take the PO’s vision and figure out if/how it is possible (Conceptualizer), and then break down the tasks in order for the team to get there (Implementor).
Ok this one is going to be a cop-out for me, but my answer for the developer is all 7. I say this because the development group is a team inside of a team. If I were to pick a ‘leaning’ towards a set of roles it would be Implementor, Conceptualizer, Organizer and Team Builder as they are roles that lean towards execution rather than delegation.
All the Roles are important for an effective team, but I hope for the scrum lovers out there, this gives you a better understanding of the Roles and how they are used as a vessel to build and foster better teams.
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