Perspectives

Teams vary, but most projects will have you working alongside others.

While we could list roles and their responsibilities, agile teams tend toward self-organization and collaboration instead of fixed skillsets with silos and hand-offs. Instead of thinking about the responsibilities and limitations of specific roles, let's think first from a few perspectives.

You could think of the following three primary perspectives as the views that the core team sees from while collaborating and contributing to delivery:

Business

The business perspective is primarily thinking in terms of achieving outcomes, not building features. As an example, the business doesn't need a search feature, the business needs its employees to be able to quickly find what they need to be effective.

The perspective of the business is driving understanding of the need that the product fills and how to achieve success, balancing decisions against constraints like cost, schedule, value, and is able to help the team prioritize and decide what is most important to focus on next.

Design

The design perspective is concerned with how the system should behave to best achieve outcomes and a positive experience for the users, often researching and testing various approaches to design and assessing their impact toward achieving the goals of the product.

Technology

The technology perspective is most concerned with how a system should be built to achieve outcomes and implement design, with accountability for reliability, maintainability, and quality. This perspective will bring the deepest technical expertise to the team.

Collaboration

It is essential that these three perspectives are accounted for in all decision making and design as they each bring forward unique perspectives and understanding of the four big risks.

• Business: viability and value -- does it work for the business and will users use it?
• Design: usability -- will this work well for users?
• Technology: feasibility -- can we build this with the team, technology, time we have?

Excluding any of these perspectives from your process significantly increases the likelihood that you will not properly address important risks