What Roles and Responsibilities Should Define the Startup Founder for the Success of IT Development

Talking about the startups, I always say that it is vital to building an efficient team to be a success. Moreover, the primary responsibility of a founder is to make every team member engaged in developing a potent product. It doesn’t mean that everyone has an equal part of the coding/UI work, but if everyone gives valuable input, you get a well-weighed product. Of course, the most significant part of the work still stays for the development team.

In IT WatchDog, we often consult startup founders, who want to optimize a technical team structure and function. Sometimes it is easier to move towards an external development than to wait for results of long-term transformation. Then we help with speeding-up the onboarding of new programmers as we engage them from the pre-contracted list. However, not every startup can afford managed service as we provide. That is why I’ve written this article. In it, I will share my expertise and help startup founders to organize efficient work by themselves. So, let’s have a closer look at the essential responsibilities and roles in the product team.

Central Roles in the Agile IT Product Team

The startup differs from the project of traditional business: to be a success, the startup should have its founders fully involved in finding the product-market fit. You face many challenges and have to define roles for the best speed and adaptability. It is especially important to set the right roles and workflow at the beginning as later the unsolved problems would scale.

The most important roles for the Agile team are:

1. Product Owner, who could also be the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or if your company grow you may give this role to an executive with a marketing background
2. Scrum Master, who could also be the Chief Operations Officer (COO) or HR-manager
3. Leader of the Community(-ies) of Practice (CoP), who could also be the Chief Technical Officer (CTO).

For the startup, it is more useful to have the in-house Product Owner and Scrum Master because these people ensure the efficient workflow and clear vision of the project. The development team (i.e., the coders) can be easily outsourced.

Product Owner: Responsibilities in a Team

The Product Owner (PO) works closely with the customers. He organizes meetings, discussions, sprint demos — presentations of the product iterations with feedback from average customer representatives. PO role in the startup team is essential for:

• Creation of the product’s vision and prioritizing its features.
• Managing finances and funding.
• Hiring and team building. PO recruits specialists and makes them work together as a well-coordinated mechanism.
• Supervising and cooperation with the Leader of Community(-ies) of Practice.

If the CEO takes this role, he also manages legal, security, and taxation models to ensure a sustainable business model.

Scrum Master: Responsibilities in the Team

Scrum Master (SM) ensures the productive work of the team. He works as a servant leader to help the team practicing Agile most optimally. With time it becomes more mature, so SM provides new techniques to increase the value delivered. Also, SM helps to keep a regular rhythm of Scrum events.

If COO takes this role, he observes the effectiveness of operational and financial procedures on the spot. In the small team, there is no COO, so HR-manager or any team member can perform the role of SM.

Leader of the Community(-ies) of Practice: Responsibilities in the Team

Another vital role is the Leader of the CoP. The CTO may be the same person, but we insist that the product leadership stays on the Product Owner as he has a business perspective. The Leader of CoP works as a technology mentor for developers: UX, backend, DevOps, and QA.

There could be several developers of some specialty or the only one in the whole company. With growth, your startup becomes more than 9 people in the development team. Then you might think about distributing them into several teams working on the same product. Consider choosing the scaling framework, which we discussed in another article.

The Leader of the CoP is responsible for:

• Developing and implementing the technology strategy.
• Solutioning and architecture building.
• Ensuring the skills growth, and knowledge sharing.

There are potentially four specialties of developers in a startup. Each of them makes a possible contribution to the product while collaborating inside one Agile team or several teams united by the scaled framework. Let’s look inside each group of developer specialties.

UX Specialties

The user experience developers create the best possible experience for the users of your software. Such team members create a functional and attractive design with the means of frontend development. For the efficient work, you should have such roles in the team:

1. UX researcher undertakes the learning of the software audience. This developer runs usability tests, conducts user surveys, undertakes audits of systems, researches how the users interact with the prototype/product. This role can be performed by the Product Owner, or by the whole development team.
2. UX designer designs the interface of the product to create a distinct look and feel of the system, creates wireframes, design mockups, prototypes, frontend HTML/CSS, and templates.
3. Frontend developer builds a website with JavaScript, HTML and CSS technologies. He makes sure that the product is responsive (it functions normally on the PCs, tablets and mobile devices) and quick (the loading time is minimal).

Backend Specialties

The role of backend developers is to create the core of the application. These team members make it possible for the logic of your product app to interact with cloud services. They also ensure robust interaction of the frontend and backend parts of the software through API endpoints. The essential roles for backend developers are:

1. A backend developer is a specialist in PHP, Ruby, Java or other server-side technology. The coder creates and maintains the app logic, data and application integration, databases, performs deployment-related tasks.
2. A middleware developer connects the frontend and backend parts of the product. He responds for server-side software, which works for information flow between an application, and the server, database and OS.

DevOps Specialties

DevOps people are specialists, which are focused on the management of cloud infrastructure. They add the new code to the repository before the deployment begins and test the new code. The objective of these specialists is to achieve a perfect user experience and improve the time-to-market. The key roles in this group of specialties:

1. Cloud architect builds and manages the cloud infrastructure, chooses cloud platforms and services for the deployment, decides on the optimization of the deployment.
2. SRE, or site reliability engineer, works for the performance, availability, monitoring, and response to the incidents on the platforms and services the startup runs.
3. System administrator builds and maintains servers, user accounts, supports software engineers and managers. This specialist also works with the network infrastructure, supports development, and production infrastructures.

QA Specialties

The quality assurance specialists exist to test the application and make sure that there are no bugs and errors. Its primary responsibility is the efficient and stable performance of the software. The key roles:

1. QA analyst is responsible for the test plans. The specialist develops, manages, and performs manual and automatic testing, produces the related documentation and creates the test suites.
2. Tester has the only responsibility: to run tests. The specialist collects, reviews and analyzes the test results, and creates a report for the QA analyst.

Building a Team for the Successful IT Development

With this article, we tried to create a mental structure on optimal dev team structure and responsibilities. Use the list to identify which specialists would you need to develop an IT product.

When you have already defined the needed roles for your startup, finding the right specialists to hire is still a challenging assignment. As soon as you get a complete image of the team you need, you have three options:

1. In-house development team.
2. Staff augmentation — partial outsourcing.
3. Dedicated development team — full outsourcing.

I believe that the startup should have an in-house Product Owner and Scrum Master. The rest of the developer team may be easily outsourced. Especially with the managed services model of IT WatchDog. We offer the supervising of IT vendors that lowers the risks for your startup. We check the developers before you hire them and do control them during the whole workflow.

Working with the managed service, you get the result while concentrating on other tasks. In-house PO and SM focus on better knowledge of the needs, interests, and pains of the customers. These roles take care of funding and relations with investors. The Product Owner sets the development vector for the team, prioritizes the tasks, and controls the quality.

At the same time, the outsourced development team completes the tasks by priority, prepares the product to the sprint demos, controls the quality with the internal QA technologies.

Relying on the managed service in external development, you get a good job well done. You have the peace of mind that your MSP contracted the most appropriate IT vendor and set the most efficient workflow. As a result — you have an IT product of outstanding quality, but you don’t need to control every step of the developers.

This article was originally published on Medium.