Agile Team Structure: 2025 Guide for Non-Tech Leaders

The Agile approach is widely used in custom software development. Businesses of all sizes adopt an Agile methodology, as it lets them increase the value of their products, shorten the time to market, and facilitate digital transformations. 

According to the 17th State of Agile Report by Digital.ai, 71% of survey participants are using Agile as of 2023 within different teams:

However, successfully adopting an Agile team structure can be difficult. The report also mentions that only 59% of respondents were satisfied with the applied Agile practices, a significant drop from 71% of satisfied respondents in 2022.

There is often a disconnect between how business leaders see the implemented Agile software development team structure and how practitioners use that structure for processes, leading to cultural clashes, resistance to change, and overall disappointment with implementation inside an organization. 

To take the first step towards overcoming this, let’s reconsider the role of Agile on a digital project. Below, we discuss the Agile team structure and analyze the key characteristics of an Agile development team compared to a traditional team.

Selecting the right Agile team structure is important because it determines the backbone for processes and practices that facilitate software deliveries. You can adopt a:

Members of a generalist Agile software development team possess multiple skills, letting them cope with a wide range of challenges that can emerge within the software development lifecycle. 

Benefits:

Drawbacks:

Members of a specialist team enjoy deep expertise in certain areas, such as healthcare software development, which allows them to provide efficient, high-quality outputs. 

Benefits:

Drawbacks:

A hybrid team combines generalist and specialist structures within one approach to eliminate drawbacks of both and take over an entire complex project successfully.

Benefits:

Drawbacks:

To understand Agile software development team roles, let’s discuss developers’ roles and responsibilities in completing a project.

A project manager coordinates team efforts and streamlines communication.

Project managers are the primary contact point and a key connection between the team and the client. They are responsible for:

A business analyst turns business needs into technical requirements.

Business analysts are project managers’ helping hands, analyzing clients’ needs and ideas and formulating project requirements that Agile development teams will use to develop system features. Business analysts learn clients’ processes to help to maximize the business value of the produced software.

UI/UX designers make the software look and feel friendly and pleasant.

There are two distinctive roles: UI designers work on the visual part of the application, ensuring that all buttons, icons, descriptions, and other elements look nice and are placed where end users expect them.

UX designers are responsible for interviewing future and current software users to understand their needs, habits, and pain points, as well as to determine an optimal user path.

Software developers write the software codebase.

Software developers complete most project work by programing, stabilizing, and delivering the codebase.

Because delivering a codebase is a broad task, software developers’ roles and responsibilities vary:

QA engineers ensure software works as envisaged.

QAs use 100+ testing types to check different software states and responses, which is essential for reducing the number of errors, discovering inconsistencies in software behavior, and ensuring that software corresponds to clients’ requirements. 

Test automation can be applied to routine tasks to increase coverage of the software codebase and delivery speed.

DevOps engineers complete necessary optimization and maintenance work.

DevOps specialists link roles related to development and maintenance, facilitating project activities and increasing the delivery pace. They also work on maintaining and scaling infrastructure, helping to manage growing software complexity.

Now, let’s analyze the team structure for Agile development. Here, we focus on roles in Scrum, as it is the most commonly used Agile methodology:

Source: Less

The product owner is a person (usually on the client’s side) who is responsible for the overall project vision and its alignment with stakeholders’ needs. The product owner gathers customer needs and feedback, articulates goals, and guides the development team.

Product owners also maintain the development backlog, prioritizing tasks and aligning them with stakeholders’ expectations.

A Scrum Master facilitates the team’s workflow and fosters a culture of self-organization in which team members are proactive and take ownership of completed work. 

They lead Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, daily Scrums, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, helping to identify and resolve obstacles that can hinder the team’s progress.

An Agile software development team includes all technical specialists required to keep the project up and running, such as UI/UX designers, software developers, QAs, and DevOps. 

However, the focus within an Agile team lies on self-organization and cross-functionality rather than strict division of responsibility. This enables the team to maintain an intensive development process. 

It is important to note the role of solution architect among engineering roles. Solution architects are responsible for creating a flexible component-based architecture that enables the team to meet changing business needs. They guide software developers through architecture implementation rather than imposing a solution while focusing on mentoring.

Delivery managers oversee the entire software development process, are accountable for planning, execution, and progress tracking, manage team dynamics, and contribute to creating a collaborative work environment. 

Also, delivery managers track performance metrics, work on enhancing team efficiency, and remove barriers that could slow down the project. 

While subject matter experts are not an inherent part of the Agile team structure and roles, they become important for timely delivery. Subject matter experts provide the team with deep expertise that helps them understand project requirements and constraints. 

They also help with making strategic decisions by validating project requirements to align them with stakeholders’ needs and participating in user acceptance testing to ensure expected usability.

Let’s analyze further differences between a traditional and Agile software team structure and workflow:

The main problem with an Agile team structure is complexity. An organization or team must possess several characteristics or values that all team members share. If they don’t, the organization or team will underdeliver or fall short of the mark.

Let’s analyze the crucial characteristics of an Agile development team that a business should embrace and their importance for successful project completion:

An Agile development team is autonomous; it can organize itself into a fully functional unit and work collectively without excessive supervision or management.

Agile development teams are focused on reaching set goals within the required timeline. They concentrate on value-driven development, prioritizing deliveries with the biggest business value for the least investment.

Agile team members are usually T-shaped, possessing expertise in one specialization and competence in related areas that allow them to quickly adapt to changes. 

Agile embraces transparency, encouraging team members to keep their intentions and expectations clear. At the same time, an Agile development team strives to cut all unnecessary communication and keep meetings short to save everyone’s time and energy.

Delivery manager and Scrum Master roles are essential to an Agile team’s structure. They ensure team coordination, meet stakeholders’ needs, improve the workflow, and guide individual members.

Short sprints allow the team to receive stakeholder or user feedback quickly and adjust feature development accordingly, decreasing product delivery time. The team uses various metrics to measure velocity and enhance the development workflow.

Agile team members actively collaborate on project decisions and are encouraged to take ownership of their choices, which increases every member’s involvement in the project.

An Agile methodology encourages teams to address emerging conflicts quickly inside the team while focusing on common goals and finding a solution, contributing to a healthy work environment.

Leadership is another crucial responsibility of Scrum Masters, delivery managers, and product owners. They support and trust the team, and they inspire the team to do their best every day.

You can launch a quality product faster and for less money by opting for Agile software development compared to traditional, rigid software development. 

Hiring an Agile software development team translates into many benefits on a project, including:

Agile methodologies enhance transparency among project participants throughout the software development lifecycle, ensuring a business understands project progress.

Software developers align their vision with the overall team structure, eliminating role clashes and overlaps. 

Active involvement of the Agile development team in project decision-making fosters motivation and ownership among team members, encouraging them to meet estimated deadlines while delivering high quality.

Enhanced internal communication lets the team solve emerging problems and remove bottlenecks, increasing the pace of development.

Agile development teams work in small increments; they can switch priorities after a sprint when business needs change and reallocate resources to new priorities immediately, while a traditional team may require lengthy approvals and project re-estimates.

An Agile software development team structure helps to deliver a market-ready product faster than a traditional software development team structure as a result of greater efficiency, higher process transparency, a constant focus on high-value features, and adjustments based on stakeholders’ feedback. 

Short sprints and constant reviews of delivered functionality greatly decrease the chances of project failure or delivery of irrelevant functionality. Stakeholders can check deliverables after each sprint, identify areas for improvement, and ask for modifications.

An Agile approach helps you efficiently allocate the project budget and available resources. Because the software development team regularly assesses features based on their business value, it can help the business re-prioritize features in the backlog and focus on those deliveries that increase the product’s bottom line the most. 

An Agile development team works on user feedback and incorporates it into new iterations. This helps businesses meet customer expectations and increase satisfaction, ensuring their involvement in product development.

Also, short iterations and different techniques enable the development team to deliver critical feature improvements rapidly when necessary.

IT Craft professionals can implement different Agile software team structures, knowing that one structure cannot be equally efficient for all types of client projects. 

To meet each client’s unique business needs and constraints, IT Craft developers study client requirements to determine:

Knowledge and expertise are two crucial aspects of selecting an Agile software development team structure. IT Craft dedicated managers hold many Agile certifications and have extensive expertise in applying Agile workflows to clients’ projects. Their credentials include:

IT Craft managers also monitor project velocity; they add and remove certain roles or change the workflow during project execution to meet changing project needs.

XPERTyme is a marketplace and white-label solution for industry professionals to provide video consulting services. An enhanced MEDITyme solution is used among healthcare providers. 

The client had a prototype of the envisaged system and needed to launch an MVP within a short timeline and present it to a wide audience.

The IT Craft team used the Scrum approach to manage the client’s incomplete requirements, enabling the team to come up with constant improvements. As a result, the team launched a high-quality product within the constrained timeline and focused on user growth. 

It’s crucial to answer the question “What is an Agile team structure?” because the team structure for Agile software development is different from that of traditional teams. These differences allow an Agile development team to effectively handle incomplete project requirements and constant project changes. 

Agile software development teams rely on self-organization, process transparency, constant adaptation, and accountability. These characteristics enable the team to quickly come up with solutions for emerging problems.

As a result of implemented Agile processes, businesses can efficiently respond to changing customer needs, which is crucial for establishing their position in a crowded market.