How to facilitate a team roles and responsibilities workshop

Monica Viggars
The Startup
Published in
4 min readSep 16, 2019

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A team that understands and agrees on what one another does is likely to be more high functioning than those who don’t. Here’s how to clarify roles and responsibilities on your team…

How to facilitate a roles and responsibilities workshop — illustration by Ian Viggars
Illustration by www.ianviggars.com

What are team roles and responsibilities?

Roles are generally defined as the positions that each person on a team assumes — for example on a product team you might have a Product Manager role, a Product Designer role, etc.

Responsibilities are the specific tasks or duties that team members are expected to carry out as part of their role.

Why take time to clarify them?

Understanding what each person contributes and is responsible for is a big part of working well together and succeeding as a team.

You might need to run this exercise if you’re a new team that needs to align or an existing team that has lost its way on who is responsible for what. This may mean that team members think that another person is taking care of a particular responsibility, but that isn’t happening. This can result in frustration and inefficiencies in ways of working, for example.

Running this exercise means that the team can get clarification on what one another does as well as allowing…

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Monica Viggars
The Startup

Product Coach. Director @ Rather Good Consultancy: I help make product people awesome! 💫 Writing about the human side of Product Management.