Scrum team
Definition
A Scrum team is a small, self-managing, cross-functional group consisting of developers, one Product Owner, and one Scrum Master, collectively responsible for planning, building, and delivering a product increment each sprint.
The Scrum team is the fundamental unit of Scrum. The 2020 Scrum Guide simplified the structure significantly: there are no sub-teams, no "development team" as a separate unit. It's just the Scrum team — three accountabilities, one cohesive group.
The three accountabilities:
- Developers — the people doing the actual work of building the product. Scrum doesn't constrain this to software engineers; it's anyone who creates the increment (designers, writers, data scientists, QA engineers).
- Product Owner — one person who orders the backlog and maximizes product value.
- Scrum Master — one person who coaches Scrum and removes impediments.
Size: The Scrum Guide recommends 10 or fewer people. Research by Jeff Sutherland and others points to 5–7 as the sweet spot. Small enough to coordinate without bureaucracy; large enough to have diverse skills.
Cross-functional: The Scrum team should collectively have all the skills needed to deliver a done increment without depending on people outside the team. If design is always a bottleneck from an external team, embed a designer. If QA is always a handoff, embed a QA engineer.
Self-managing: The team decides internally how to do the work — who takes which task, in what order, using what tools. Nobody outside the team tells them how to build.
Stability matters: Scrum teams work best when they stay together across sprints and quarters. Team velocity and trust compound over time. Constant reshuffling destroys both.
Examples
- Scrum team of 6: four developers, one designer, one PO, one SM — SM also writes some code
- Product company runs three Scrum teams, each owning a distinct product surface area
- Cross-functional team embeds a QA engineer after three sprints of QA bottlenecks from an external team
- Team stays together for eight quarters — velocity stabilizes at 45 points after initial variance
- Startup founder acts as PO; external contractor acts as SM; two engineers are developers — four-person Scrum team
Related terms
Snap a scrum team. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.