Agile Changes Team Roles

You might be accustomed to project managers who decide on dates. You might not have seen a product manager since the last millennium. That all changes in agile. In agile, the product owner or customer decides which features (including technical debt or defects) the team will work on and when.

The team then is in charge of how the team does the work. The team makes all the architectural and design decisions. The team is free to attempt to change the product owner’s mind about when to do something to make it easier to implement a feature.

No one outside the team designs for the team. That includes UX people, product managers, and architects outside the team. The team makes its own decisions. (See Chapter 9, ​Create Technical Excellence​, for ideas about how the team knows it creates useful and maintainable work.)

There is a role for architects and project managers in an agile project. They are part of the team and deliver code as part of the team. See more about this in Chapter 4, ​Agile Requires Different Project Leadership​.

Because the team delivers on its own, the team needs to be a reasonable size for the team to work together well.