An Agile Team is a cross-functional group of typically ten or fewer individuals with all the skills necessary to define, build, test, and deliver value to their customer.
Agile Teams may be technical teams focused on building digitally-enabled solutions, business teams delivering business functions, or, increasingly, elements of both. By quickly delivering work in small increments, all Agile Teams strive for fast learning, gaining fast customer feedback, assessing the results, and adjusting accordingly.
Agile teams are self-organizing and self-managing and are accountable for delivering results that meet the needs and expectations of their customers and stakeholders.
Agile Teams power the Agile Release Train (ART) and thereby, the entire development portfolio. Agile teams collaborate with other teams to deliver ART solutions. They contribute to the Vision and Roadmap, and participate in ART events. In addition, teams build the Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) that accelerates the flow of value and supports the ability to Release on Demand.
Agile teams are cross-functional, long-lived, and organized to deliver value as easily as possible. By building longer-lived teams and trains, enterprises can eliminate the start-stop-start ‘project’ way of working (see Lean Budgets) and eliminate waste and delays in the process. Agile Teams’ Lean-Agile Leaders provide the vision, guidance, and autonomy necessary to foster and promote high-performing Agile teams. As a result, assigning work to individual team members is no longer required. Teams become self-directed, self-reliant, and have more autonomy, further enabling decentralized decision-making all the way to the individual contributor. Agile teams are more productive than groups of similar individuals, are more engaged in their work, and have more fun on the job.
All Agile teams share certain defining characteristics, as described in the following sections.
Most Agile Teams are a part of an Agile Release Train and deliver value together with other teams that operate within the context of a common solution mission. They synchronize frequently with other teams, stakeholders, and their management. Some Agile teams—for example, business teams, enabler teams that support multiple ARTs, independent research teams, LACE teams, etc.— can deliver value independently of an ART, but they still benefit from their Agile method in establishing the flow of customer value.
This article describes common characteristics and responsibilities for all types of SAFe Agile teams.
Agile teams are composed of members dedicated full-time to their teams and contain all the functions they need to deliver value (Figure 1). This avoids individuals multiplexing across teams and eliminates the handoffs and delays that occur when pushing value across functional silos. Most generally, Agile Teams are capable, enabled, and able to:
SAFe Principle #10 – Organize around value, guides enterprises to organize people and teams around one goal: the continuous delivery of value to the customer. But to do so, they must consider how best to design their Agile Teams. As described in the book Team Topologies [1], SAFe recommends four primary ways to organize Agile Teams (Figure 2).
Further guidance on this important aspect of organizing Agile Teams can be found in the extended guidance article Organizing Agile Teams and ARTs: Team Topologies at Scale.
Great teams require more than talented individuals. Team composition and dynamics play a significant role. In fact, who is on a team has less impact on performance than how the team works together. High-performing teams share many ‘teaming’ characteristics:
SAFe’s Organizational Agility competency provides more information on how Lean-thinking people and high-performing Agile Teams work to create better business outcomes.
Agile Teams are further enabled by two specialty roles (Figure 3).
1. The Product Owner (PO) contributes to the Vision and roadmap and works with the team to define Stories and prioritize the team’s work. By working with the customer and the teams, they define a backlog that addresses customer needs and also helps maintain the technical integrity of the product.
2. The Scrum Master / Team Coach (SM/TC) helps implement and maintain Agile practices, optimizes and improves team performance, partners with the Release Train Engineer (RTE) to guide improvements of the entire ART, and helps to optimize the flow of value.
When an Agile Team applies SAFe Scrum, the SM/TC has specialty skills to facilitate effective implementation of SAFe Scrum. When a team applies SAFe Team Kanban, the SM/TC has the specialty skills to facilitate an effective Kanban implementation.
Every Agile Team is responsible for establishing a fast, reliable flow of value to the customer. They achieve this by mastering two primary aspects (Figure 4):
SAFe Scrum and SAFe Team Kanban provide a set of practices that guide the team. This includes events, communication strategies, and specific rules that direct the progress of the work. But these methods work best with an underlying paradigm that helps the team maximize the flow of value to the customer. SAFe Flow Accelerators (SAFe Principle #6) provides this guiding paradigm. As part of this, teams:
Most teams start their Agile journey by adopting SAFe Scrum. Practices like cadence-based planning, commitment to iteration goals, frequent retros, a daily sync, and adhering to a short iteration timebox are routine.
However, the work of some teams is better suited to respond to frequent and less plannable events. In this case, SAFe Team Kanban is often the preferred team operating model. SAFe Team Kanban is less dependent on iteration timeboxes, focusing more on a continuous flow of stories through the backlog to the customer.
Both methods are highly effective and are more alike than they are different. And in SAFe, both types of teams apply a Kanban system to manage their backlogs and work activities. In addition, many Agile teams build hybrid models to address their specific needs.
The objective of every Agile Team is the same: to build the great products their customers need. They fulfill five primary areas of responsibility, as shown in Figure 5.
Each is described in the sections below.
Note: ‘Product’ is an important choice of words here. Realistically, not every team delivers a tangible, standalone product to an end-user customer, more typically, the full ART is required to do that. However, every team can and should recognize that whatever value they deliver—be it product, systems, subsystem, component, services, APIs, or other valuable assets—all benefit from treating their work as a product and knowing their customer, be they internal or external to the enterprise.
Agile Teams are responsible for understanding customer needs and defining the functionality needed to satisfy them. In order to develop a thorough understanding of the customer context, they apply Customer Centricity. To understand the problem and design the right solution, they apply Design Thinking. Doing so requires that all Agile teams:
Additionally, effective Agile teams spend time developing and understanding their primary user personas— and their needs, struggles, and opportunities for improvement.
Agile Teams plan their own work. Planning allows teams to stay aligned with the rest of the train and progressively refine work within a short timeframe. Planning involves all team members and relies on collaboration and transparency. Effective planning facilitates alignment to a common goal while leveraging the flexibility and autonomy of each team member in achieving their objectives. Planning occurs at two levels:
Value delivery is the primary task of an Agile Team. As a part of this effort, a team must be able to define, build, and test their stories. Many teams can also directly deploy new functionality into production or release them directly to the customer. This is the core process that takes place in the Development Value Stream to which the team contributes.
The speed of solution development depends directly on the speed and fidelity of the feedback the team can obtain. Without it, the team cannot adjust the course quickly. Errors start to accumulate, resulting in ineffective and delayed solutions. Both customer and technology feedback are needed to move forward effectively.
Relentless improvement is a core value of SAFe. Agile teams constantly seek ways to improve their process and the outcomes they are responsible for.
SAFe provides a comprehensive approach for measuring competency, flow, and outcomes, the three primary measures that predict business results (Figure 6).
As a part of the improvement effort, the teams do the following:
[1] Skelton, Matthew, and Manuel Pais. Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. IT Revolution Press, 2019.
Last update: 22 August 2023
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