Roles & Responsibilities for Product Teams

The board helps agile teams to align on roles and responsibilities by mapping out status quo and defining a target of how we see each other.

Why use Roles & Responsibilities (R&R)?

It’s a very simple, yet powerful card sorting game, which can be used by design, product and tech leaders as well as agile coaches. It will help you and your product teams to understand the current status quo of how you work and align on a vision of how you want to collaborate in the future. It has the power to serve in very critical situations, when roles and responsibilities aren’t clearly defined and might cause frustrations and anger.

I've personally seen my teams thrive after a R&R workshop as it supports you and your team to come up with a clear map of how work life can be, boosting teams motivation and pathing the way for clear next steps which can be implemented right away. It has the power to lead to further reorganizations within the company and clarify R&R beyond product teams.

It was developed by Ahmed Sidky from Riot Games first. Adapted by Jeff Patton and further developed as Miro board for my workshops I run as Thomas Gläser.

How to use the Roles & Responsibilities template

1. Teams pick responsibilities and sort them by role (Status Quo)

2. Teams analyze and mark opportunities and risks of the current distribution

3. Teams map out their desired state of the roles & responsibility distribution (each team on their own)

4. Merge the cards based on similarity. Align on a desired state.

5. Question to the team: What can we do already in the next sprint to get one step closer to the desired state?

PS: Feel free to add new roles like VP Product or Director UX to clarify expectations toward those roles.

You're welcome to change or add responsibilities. Please keep in mind to not overcomplicate this exercise.

Enjoy mapping and aligning on roles and responsibilities!