Structure within teams
Most of our operational teams follow a certain structural pattern. This consists of an Ikigai relationship between engineering managers, agile coaches, and product owners or, in some teams, project managers. This structure is thought to help cover the most important topics in a team.
Product owners or project managers (effectiveness)
Their main question is: are we doing the right thing?
- Align with business goals
- Track business metrics, e.g. no. of checkouts, cvr, aov
- Prioritize customer and stakeholder requirements
Agile coaches (efficiency)
Their main question is: are we doing things right?
- Coach teams to maturity and performance (mission statement agile community)
- Track agile metrics, e.g cycle time, waiting times, bottle necks, wip
- Support team roles & stakeholders to work in an agile context
Engineering managers (skills & tech strategy)
Their main question is: do we have everything in our team to do it?
- Development of team members personally
- Keep tracking of required skills
- Ensure technical excellence
Individual contributors
Each team has a combination of different individual contributors to succeed in their domain and projects. For product teams the ICs are usually a group of engineers, a UI/UX designer, and a quality engineer. Service-oriented (platform/enabling) teams usually consist of a more homogenous group of roles, e.g. operations has mostly admins and devops people.