Sprint Team Roles

Here are the current Login.gov sprint team roles and responsibilities. This is a living document and will evolve as our teams do.

All Team Members

  • Continuously supports diversity, equity and inclusion of our teams and the work we do for the public
  • Attends agile ceremonies (daily standup, backlog refinement, planning, retros)
  • Look for ways the team can work more efficiently, save cost, and brings that up in a helpful way.
  • Demos work at Demo day
  • Attends team-wide meetings like Login.gov all-hands
  • Generally working during “core hours” (roughly 12-4 EST)
  • Understand the team’s goals and help the team work towards them
  • Help the team plan for future sprints
    • By collaborating on writing JIRA tickets through various team ceremonies
    • Influencing prioritization of the product
    • Identify goals and the capacity to meet those goals

All Engineering Disciplines

  • Writes the code the makes up the product
  • Reviews pull requests, technical documentations (e.g. RFQ/tech proposal) and is nice about it
  • Working in small increments; communicate about why things are changed
  • Keep documentation up to date, write in plain language (e.g. writing for newly hired/junior engineers and non-engineers), use illustrations and anecdotes to explain technical concepts.
  • Provides technical insight when designing solutions to user problems
  • Provides technical insight when planning future work and prioritizing
  • Balance work on new features with investments into the platform
  • Be inclusive and communicate with Engineers, Partnership Engineers on other scrum teams when you are writing code for a project that is not assigned to your team
  • Writes tests to validate the functionality of the code, ensuring it does what we expect it to now, and continues to later
  • Supports code in production and enhances tools and instrumentation to make the product more supportable
  • Understands technical security, compliance, and privacy requirements and works with subject matter experts when they have questions
  • Contributes to and maintains the Login.gov Design System
  • All team members should be accountable to each other and responsible as a group for achieving the sprint goals. This typically means a commitment to completing the stories brought into a sprint.
  • Foster a sense of collaboration with other engineers on the project by agreeing on an approach outside of meetings with stakeholders and other team members.

Product Owner

  • NOTE: This is a role description specific to the scrum teams with respect to tactical execution. Many (if not all) folks holding this role also serve as a strategic product manager (which is not covered in this description).
  • Responsible for prioritizing the work/backlog for the scrum team.
    • Including sprint retrospectives
    • Provides sprint goals for scrum team
    • Not responsible for committing how much work the team takes on during a sprint.
  • Responsible for ensuring that work scrum team takes on links to roadmap/strategy/goals.
    • Works with product manager to ensure strategic goals are updated based on feedback from scrum team. I.e. strategy and tactical execution are a feedback loop, not just a unidirectional flow.
  • Responsible for story acceptance
  • Accountable (along with scrum master) for optimizing execution efficiencies:
    • Shortening feedback cycles and minimizing stage gate execution.
    • Balancing focus on sprint goals along with disruptions
  • Accountable for sprint reports that communicate outcomes accomplished by the scrum team.
  • Accountable for ensuring the problem definition and context of work is clear for the scrum team prior to work being taken on.
    • Reflected in user stories, tasks taken on by the team
  • Consulted on solutions being considered to address the aforementioned problem definitions.

Scrum Master

  • Facilitates sprint ceremonies
  • Agile advocate
  • Supports team by limiting outside distractions and helping to remove blockers
  • Supports Product Owner by supporting sprint goals and backlog prioritization within the team. Important to be in lock-step with PO to ensure alignment and minimize confusion.
  • Make the teams aware of places they could improve. Help them to improve in those areas.
  • Foster collaboration between team members. This may mean suggesting pairing between people working on similar issues, or making space for discussing a problem the team is working on.
  • Helps the team be accountable to itself. This often means tracking the changes the team wants to make in how it works and checking-in on whether those changes are being applied.

Product Designer

  • Create and maintain visual design assets in Figma
  • Contribute to and maintain assets in the Login.gov Design System
  • Create, contribute and maintain assets in Figma Library and Login.gov Design System
  • Facilitate and guide teams through UX explorations in studios/workshops
  • Collaborate with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, UX Writers and Engineers to receive feedback early (and often!) on visual design work
  • Review front-end improvements throughout the development process and support and provide feedback to Engineers
  • Write, perform and synthesize research methods that help to enhance various Login.gov products
  • Advocate for product improvements to Product Owners based on research findings
  • Create prompts, prototypes, and exercises that encourage conversation.

UX Writer

  • Creates and edits content on various Login.gov products and services
  • Write, perform and synthesize research methods that help to enhance various Login.gov products
  • Create knowledge articles and email templates in salesforce for contact center when a new app launches