Building high-performance teams

8 project team roles that will define your software product success

Time for reading: 8 min

Oftentimes, project teams are made up of a mess of goals, deadlines, and emotions. Only well-structured defined responsibilities and roles in IT projects can turn such teams into a force that drives your software product.

The main project players and their responsibilities

#1 Product Owner – the “heart” of business value

In Agile software development, Product Owner (PO) is the one who has a vision of the final product and can convey it to the project team.

Oftentimes, PO is introduced by C-level executives who are more than passionate about the final result and know exactly why the product should exist.

The more important the project is for the company, the higher PO’s position in the business.

In short, the Product Owner is a bridge between the project team and stakeholders.

The responsibilities of the Product Owner on an Agile project includes forming a list of the required functionality as well as prioritizing and re-prioritizing the required features in line with the business strategy and objectives.

The main goal of the Product Owner is delivering the best value possible. The right person with a required authority and engagement in the process is the basic of the project success.

The lack of the PO may cause far-reaching effects like workflow issues, unclear requirements, missed deadlines, and team frustration.

Further reading – Software development methodologies 101: which one is better suited to your project?

#2 Project Sponsor – the provider

Project Sponsor provides the resources including budgeting and financial support.

Typically, Project Sponsor is a person from the senior management who has the ability and trust to take on financial decisions. He has the right to approve all the additional expenses that may appear during project development.

The Sponsor should be aware of the emerging issues or requests and help resolve financial conflicts, as well as remove financial obstacles. In case the Sponsor has no or limited authority to approve expenses, it will be difficult for a team to run the project efficiently.

The engagement of the Sponsor is also mission-critical, as a poorly engaged Project Sponsor can become a barrier to success.

#3 Stakeholders – the interested parties

Unlike other roles in the team, stakeholders include a broad scope of people, internal or external to the project or organization, who have an interest in the project, its goals, impact, and outcomes.

In a broad sense, a stakeholder is anyone who takes part in a project or is influenced by its outcomes.

For a better understanding of this large group of people, let’s split them into three main groups:

  • Primary stakeholders are people who are directly affected (positively or negatively) by project decisions or outcomes. Shareholders, top managers, team members, strategic clients/partners – anyone with functional or financial interest in the given project.
  • Secondary stakeholders are people with an indirect interest to the project, who are still influential. They could be clients, vendors, competitors, government, creditors etc.
  • Key stakeholders possess an authority to dictate whether a project is a success is not, as they directly affect the project and vise versa. They may belong to both primary or secondary groups.

Prioritize all stakeholders and focus your attention on the “most important” at this point in time. Otherwise you risk to drown in suggestions from dozens of people, and the project may never launch.

Your “most important” stakeholders should be open for communication, available and powerful enough to influence the project outcome. They also should be involved in the process as early as possible and stay involved throughout the whole project lifecycle.

#4 Project Manager – the “godfather”

Project Manager (PM) is responsible for planning, organizing, managing (budget, scope, schedule, risk, and quality) on all phases of a project.

In short, a Project Manager is a person with an exact answer to the questions ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’ on the project.

PMs remove the blockers that occur during the project and manage all meetings and communication.

This role involves managing project risks, financial performance, ensuring the proper resources, communicating with the stakeholders, and motivating everyone to remain focused on reaching the project goals.

In the most famous Agile frameworks, for example, Scrum, the team doesn’t involve Project Manager. Istead, it has a Scrum Master. All the responsibilities of PM in such a case are shared among other team members – Scrum Master, Product Owner etc.

A common illusion is that the Scrum Master is just the Agile Project Manager in a different wrapper.

The core difference between them is that the PM owns a project and bears responsibility for its success. Meanwhile, a Scrum Master answers for the Scrum practices focusing on bringing out the best from the team.

In such a way, Scrum Master is more a servant leader and protector than command-and-control Project Manager.

Scrum Master protects the team and makes sure everybody is focused on the project and has no distractions or bottlenecks. Additionally, he protects the workflow itself and keeps track that all the members of the team are following the Scrum framework rules.

He attends daily meetings with the team members and the Product Owner, divides the project into phases, controls whether the objectives are completed and maintains the streamline flow of the project.

#5 Business Analyst – the explorer

Business requirements are the basis for creating web and mobile applications. Business Analyst (BA) is a translator of business opportunities into clear-cut project requirements. Among the primary responsibilities of BA are:

  • Extracting and anticipating the requirements of the business, as incomplete and/or improper requirements may do a bad turn to the project.
  • Limiting the requirements by holding the attention on the critical business needs.
  • Transforming business needs into technical requirements.

The role of Business Analyst is hotly disputed. For instance, Scrum teams do not consider Business Analyst as one of the necessary software development team roles.

We are convinced that lack of Business Analyst for some projects may lead to failure. Don’t hand this role over to the Product Owner, as he is going to have a very hard time communicating daily on tech details with developers when PO is a business representative, not a tech expert.

#6 UI/UX Designer – the artist

While User Interface (UI) design is dedicated to how the application is laid out, User Experience (UX) focuses on the way end users interact with the app during the customer journey.

Simply defined, UI represents the way the things look and UX is the way things work.

Source: thecdm.ca

Basically, UI/UX designers are turning the project idea into a visual thing.

In MindK, UI/UX designer participates is generating original graphic designs, user interface elements, creating UI mockups and prototypes, and determining and troubleshooting the UX problems.

One thing to keep in mind: your designer should have an ability to collaborate with business representatives and the development team during the whole project life cycle.

#7 Back-end and front-end developers – the masters of magic

Software developers transform the ideas and requirements into a piece of a working product.

As developers are working on building the necessary product features, they are the ones who affect the performance of the whole team the most.

Apart from actually coding, the development team is usually responsible for making time estimates according to technical requirements and communicating the status of the features.

Make it possible for developers to review each other’s code, considering ways to make work easier and faster. Bringing different experiences and learning from each other contributes to the project success.

#8 Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers – the check-takers

Quality Assurance engineers guarantee that the application meets the business requirements. Moreover, they guard it from bugs, errors, and defects.

Some clients exclude this role from the team to save time and money. But, professional QA actually is all about saving time and money by avoiding faulty code at further stages of development, software bugs and users frustration.

In case the testing is poorly done, the whole experience of discovering the product by real users may fail. Thus, no matter how well you planned and organized the workflow within your team, the reputation of the company can be affected by the final result.

Ready to build a dream team for your next project?

It is clear that each team needs time to mature before delivering great results. But as soon as everybody understands their roles and each other’s strengths, the whole development process becomes smooth and efficient.

When starting a project, make sure you have all the required personnel for the project. Define the key software development roles for each team member and let everyone in your squad know exactly what is expected of him. You can also enlist the help of an experienced software development company.

So, are you ready to build your own software development team?

We have the people who will guide you to your goals, just drop us a line!

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