Building Your Best Sprint Team
A sprint sounds like a great idea to solve that challenge your company’s been having. But who should be a part of it? When you decide to plan a sprint, you need to gather a mix of people with the knowledge, expertise, and ideas to find the right solution.
How Many People?
To start off with, how many people are needed for a good sprint?
In their book SPRINT: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Jake Knapp, Braden Kowitz, and John Zeratsky say, “We’ve found the ideal size for a sprint to be seven people or fewer. With eight people, or nine, or more, the sprint moves more slowly, and you’ll have to work harder to keep everyone focused and productive. With seven or fewer, everything is easier” (Knapp, Jake, et al. 33).
As the saying goes, too many cooks spoil the broth. Having less people makes things easier to manage while leaving enough room for a variety of perspectives.
Which People?
Now that you know how many people should be involved, you need to choose the best candidates for the team. The obviously important ones would be those who directly work with the product. But it is also crucial to have people who can bring unique perspectives from their side of management.
According to Knapp et al., “So who should you include? Of course you’ll want some of the folks who build the product or run the service - the engineers, designers, product, managers, and so on. After all, they know how your company’s products and services work and they might already have ideas about the problem at hand. But you shouldn’t limit your sprint team to just those who normally work together.
Sprints are most successful with a mix of people: the core people who work on execution along with a few extra experts with specialized knowledge” (Knapp, Jake, et al. 33).
Like many things in life, a diversity of opinions and personalities breeds the best and most unexpected ideas.
Sprints are most successful with a mix of people: the core people along with a few extra experts
The Decider
While the team members may come up with many great ideas, they have to know what they are working on and what they should commit to prototype. For this, they need a Decider.
“The Decider is the official decision-maker for the project [...] These Deciders generally understand the problem in depth, and they often have strong opinions and criteria to help find the right solution” (Knapp, Jake, et al. 30).
The Facilitator
The sprint team can’t just be the people working on the problem - there needs to be someone to guide them. This is where the Facilitator comes in. The Facilitator is an unbiased figure who leads the sprint team through activities and discussions and manages time to make sure they stay on track.
An effective facilitator provides a pair of fresh eyes as they are impartial and unbiased
According to Douglas Ferguson’s article What Makes a Good Sprint Facilitator?, “An effective facilitator provides a pair of fresh eyes as they are impartial and unbiased. For this reason, I always recommend using an external facilitator to guarantee that they are truly neutral and open-minded. This unprejudiced perspective will ensure that they will allow the process to guide outcomes rather than pushing their own agenda” (Ferguson).
With a good mix of sprint members, a strong Decider, and an unbiased Facilitator, the sprint is set up for success and can begin to tackle their problem one day at a time.
Sources:
Ferguson, Douglas. “What Makes a Good Sprint Facilitator?” Voltage Control, 16 Oct. 2017, voltagecontrol.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-sprint-facilitator/.
Knapp, Jake, et al. SPRINT: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days Bantam Press, 2016.
