Ask HN: What's the Role of a Team Lead in a SCRUM Environment? - ameida
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MalcolmDiggs
Strictly speaking, the closest thing to a "team lead" would be the
ScrumMaster. In a scrum, all team-members are just "developers", there's no
hierarchy or differentiation in status between them.

The ScrumMaster is less of a PM, and more a "Servant Leader"; their role is to
empower the the other team members, get road-blocks out of their way, and keep
stakeholders/product-owners from butting in during a sprint.

Hope that helps.

For more info, I'd recommend starting here:

[http://www.scrumprimer.org/scrumprimer20.pdf](http://www.scrumprimer.org/scrumprimer20.pdf)

And then jumping into this book if you're really interested in the topic:

[http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Developer-
Pra...](http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Developer-
Practices/dp/073561993X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1460056613&sr=8-2)

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davismwfl
It really depends on the environment.

At one place I was at they were "Agile" and said they utilized "SCRUM"
methods, but yet the PM's were running dev team meetings and really they were
just status meetings that took a dev team of 3-4 people 30-45 minutes to get
through, totally not the purpose in my opinion.

When I took over a team at that same company, I immediately took over the
process and turned the meetings into roughly 10-15 minutes long where we
announced roadblocks, issues and what we accomplished and were working on. If
needed, we would schedule a separate time to discuss details of specific
issues that needed more time. I still invited the PM's but didn't let them ask
for status updates on each scheduled task or defect item. I would instead
provide them a status update weekly as made sense, sometimes more often in the
case of defects.

Personally, I have been part of a lot of environments even as a consultant and
seen a lot of varied implementations. At least from my experience the ones
that try to layer it with every possible role, and have separate scrum masters
etc just aren't as successful. I personally think they miss the point. The
idea is to remove layers of process to make all teams more effective, not just
development. I have a feeling that the original scrum concepts were perverted
by PM consultants and training courses which added back in lots of process and
layers to something that is supposed to be lightweight and nimble.

IMO the ones I always see the most successful are when a technical lead is
running the process, at the dev team level. And the PM or product owner is
interfacing with only the team lead or maybe one person between the team lead
and themselves. This removes unnecessary layers, keeps the dev team focused,
and still gives great insight for the business into what is happening and
makes the process pretty damn fast. It does mean that a team lead is not
coding as much, they are instead focused on keeping the monkey off the dev
teams back, but that is kinda the job role. In the one place, I was their
Chief Software Architect (as a consultant) and I acted as the go between for
team leads and the business, which worked well because the team leads stayed
more heads down and I could articulate both architecture and schedule issues
back to the business. That was really successful, but a little sole sucking
for me.

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ameida
So practically if in an environment we should apply a strict Scrum
implementation, there is no role called Team Lead and the team lead can be
seen as a senior team member in the scrum team?

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denis_ftfm
In a strict Scrum implementation there is none. But there are team activities
which are not governed by Scrum even in its best implementation - like
vacations, business trips, performance evaluations, time and status reports
for PMs or any other higher-ups etc. These things often end up as
responsibility of one single person and then he is most often called a Team
Lead.

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ameida
How can a team lead evaluate his team members if he is not part of the scrum
team?

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ameida
I'm a team leader and my company is now migrating to an agile scrum
organisation. It seems that the direction is to remove the team lead role and
replace it by line managers and scrum masters. Can these 2 positions cover the
team leader roles? Can we keep the team leader role in a Scrum organisation?

