Responsibilities vs Accountabilities - A Better Understanding of Agile Roles

Responsibilities vs Accountabilities - A Better Understanding of Agile Roles

Product Owner: 

Accountabilities

• Product Vision: Craft a Product Vision that points the team in a meaningful direction.
• Product Strategy: Define a strategy enabling the team to decide what to do and what not to do.
• Goals: Set meaningful goals that enable teams to focus and intensively collaborate towards a unique direction.
• Value Maximization: Prioritize meaningful problems that maximize the outcomes for users and businesses.
• Communication: Ensure stakeholders are well-informed about results, decisions, progress, etc. In summary, they should never say, “I was unaware of that.”

Responsibilities

• Stakeholder Management: Engage with stakeholders to partner up and create value for products. This includes organizing meetings, workshops, communication, etc.
• Backlog Management: Curate, sort, and clean up the Product Backlog to ensure it has the most relevant items to create value.
• Roadmap: Craft product roadmaps to provide perspective and set expectations on where the product is heading.
• Monitor results: Constantly evaluate KPIs to understand how the product creates value for end-users.
• Product Discovery: Ensure continuous learning to enable innovation and solve problems users care about.

ScrumMaster:

Accountabilities

• Scrum Understanding: Ensure business stakeholders understand how to play the Scrum game.
• Atmosphere: Develop a collaborative atmosphere with a balance between learning and delivering.
• Framework: Ensure that all Scrum events occur and that all artifacts are created as defined in the Scrum Guide.
• Teams’ Effectiveness: Enable the team to grow and become as effective as possible.
• Enable Self-management: Unleashes the team’s potential by helping them become self-managing teams.

Responsibilities

• Ensure the Sprint Retrospective takes place: The Scrum Master may facilitate the Sprint Retrospective, but the responsibility is ensuring that it happens. Another team member can run the show.
• Ensure Retrospectives End Up with Actions: After each Sprint, Scrum teams discuss how to get better as a team. Scrum Masters ensure the result of the session has clear agreed actions.
• Coach stakeholders: Invest whatever is necessary to coach key business people to enable teams to thrive with Scrum.
• Scrum Events: Ensure the team respects the Scrum Events frequency and timeboxes them.

Development Team: 

Accountabilities

• Quality: Ensure the code meets the agreed quality standards.
• Scalability: Creates solutions that scale to the required business needs.
• Efficiency: Guarantee solutions are efficient from the users’ perspective.
• Maintainability: Develop an application that can be maintainable by other professionals.

Responsibilities

• Solution: Implement solutions that solve the agreed problems.
• Test: Perform required tests to meet the quality expectations.
• Delivery: Define a delivery process and execute it accordingly.
• Estimate: Only those who work on the solution can estimate it.