Signal Boost: "Me and My Friends”, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers
A perfect reminder that great outcomes are never delivered alone. They happen when empowered teams, each bringing their own strengths, discover and deliver together.

Product Team Role Descriptions

An overview of the core roles that sit at the heart of the product model.

Product Manager

Purpose:
Owns the product’s value and viability, ensuring that customer needs and business goals are met through discovery and delivery.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and prioritise customer problems to solve.
• Align product outcomes with business strategy.
• Lead discovery efforts with the team, validating ideas early.
• Make tough trade-off decisions to maximise customer and business value.
• Collaborate daily with Designers and Engineers to shape solutions.
• Measure success based on real customer outcomes, not outputs.

Skills and Attributes:

• Deep understanding of customers, markets, and business models.
• Strong problem framing and decision making skills.
• Comfort with ambiguity and iterative learning.
• Clear communicator who aligns diverse stakeholders around outcomes.

"The Product Manager is the team’s compass — always pointing to customer value."

Product Designer

Purpose:
Owns usability, crafting intuitive and delightful experiences that solve real customer problems.

Key Responsibilities:

• Partner with Product Managers and Engineers to explore customer needs.
• Design user journeys, wireframes, prototypes, and final interfaces.
• Test concepts and designs with real users early and often.
• Ensure accessibility, inclusivity, and ease of use.
• Advocate for the customer at every stage of discovery and delivery.

Skills and Attributes:

• Strong UX and interaction design expertise.
• Ability to turn complex problems into simple, elegant solutions.
• Empathy for users and a curiosity to learn from them.
• Comfortable iterating fast and learning through feedback.

"The Product Designer ensures the solution is not just functional — but delightful."

Engineers

Purpose:
Own technical feasibility, building solutions that are scalable, secure, and maintainable.

Key Responsibilities:

• Engage in discovery from the start to shape viable solutions.
• Design and build high quality, scalable software.
• Write automated tests and ensure continuous integration and deployment.
• Champion technical excellence and sustainable delivery practices.
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers and Designers to adapt as they learn.

Skills and Attributes:

• Strong coding, architecture, and problem solving skills.
• Passion for building systems that are robust and adaptable.
• Ownership mindset — caring about the outcome, not just the task.
• Comfortable with fast feedback cycles and iteration.

"Engineers in empowered teams are co-creators, not code factories."

Optional Product Team Supporting Roles

Data Analyst or Data Scientist (Supporting)

Purpose:
Enable evidence-based discovery and measure outcomes effectively.

Key Responsibilities:

• Provide insights into customer behaviour and business performance.
• Help validate hypotheses during product discovery.
• Build dashboards and metrics that track product success.
• Support A/B testing and experimentation.

Quality Engineer (Supporting)

Purpose:
Embed quality throughout discovery and delivery, ensuring reliability from day one.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define quality practices early in the design process.
• Build automated tests at multiple levels (unit, integration, end-to-end).
• Champion continuous improvement in testing and delivery practices.

Technical Lead (Supporting)

Purpose:
Guide engineering quality and technical decisions while remaining hands-on.

Key Responsibilities:

• Shape system design and ensure long-term scalability.
• Coach Engineers in best practices.
• Act as a bridge between Engineering and Architecture teams.

Supporting Role Descriptions (Outside the Product Team)

Delivery Manager

Purpose:
Protects and enhances the delivery flow of the empowered product team without taking over product ownership.

Key Responsibilities:

• Remove external blockers that slow down the team.
• Manage dependencies between teams and across programmes.
• Support the team’s continuous improvement in delivery practices.
• Monitor delivery health without micromanaging individuals.
• Help the team maintain sustainable pace without compromising quality.

Skills and Attributes:

• Strong facilitation, problem solving, and coordination skills.
• Deep understanding of agile delivery practices.
• Focused on enabling teams rather than controlling them.
• Comfortable working across organisational boundaries.

"The best Delivery Managers do not control the team — they clear the path."

Scrum Master

Purpose:
Coach the product team in agile practices, continuous improvement, and healthy collaboration.

Key Responsibilities:

• Facilitate agile ceremonies (if Scrum is used) such as sprint planning, stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives.
• Help the team identify and remove internal blockers.
• Foster a culture of feedback, transparency, and learning.
• Support self-organisation and cross-functional collaboration.

Skills and Attributes:

• Deep expertise in Scrum and other agile frameworks.
• Strong coaching and facilitation skills.
• A servant-leader mindset focused on enabling team autonomy.
• Ability to build psychological safety within teams.

"Scrum Masters create the conditions for empowered teams to thrive."

Project Manager

Purpose:
Coordinate delivery across multiple teams and manage programme-level risks without interfering with empowered team ownership.

Key Responsibilities:

• Track and manage cross-team or cross-stream dependencies.
• Surface and manage programme or portfolio risks and issues.
• Align stakeholders across broader initiatives and timelines.
• Support governance and reporting requirements where needed.

Skills and Attributes:

• Strong stakeholder management and coordination skills.
• Ability to think systemically across multiple teams.
• Comfortable enabling team autonomy while supporting broader delivery goals.
• Skilled at surfacing risks early without creating unnecessary process overhead.

"In empowered delivery, Project Managers connect the work — they do not command it."

Change Manager

Purpose:
Drive adoption, readiness, and behavioural change to ensure that solutions delivered by empowered teams achieve real business impact.

Key Responsibilities:

• Plan and execute business readiness activities, such as communication, training, and stakeholder engagement.
• Manage the people side of change: adoption, resistance, and advocacy.
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers to understand impact areas.
• Ensure that delivered solutions are embedded into business-as-usual practices.

Skills and Attributes:

• Expertise in change management frameworks and behavioural adoption.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
• A strategic mindset focused on adoption outcomes, not just delivery.
• Ability to work alongside product and project teams without undermining empowerment.

"Building the solution is half the journey. Change Managers make sure it sticks."

Business Analyst (Supporting Role)

Purpose:
Provide specialist input such as business rules, domain expertise, or regulatory knowledge during discovery — without owning requirements or defining solutions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Help uncover hidden business rules, legacy constraints, or regulatory obligations.
• Support discovery activities led by the Product Manager and team.
• Validate technical and business assumptions where deep domain knowledge is needed.
• Provide input into documentation without owning the end solution.

Skills and Attributes:

• Deep knowledge of the business domain and regulatory landscape.
• Strong analytical and communication skills.
• Comfortable influencing discovery without controlling it.
• Collaborative, flexible, and outcome-focused.

"Business Analysts support empowered discovery — they do not substitute for it."

What it All Comes Down To

Great products do not come from rigid plans or long checklists. They come from teams that are trusted to figure things out, supported by the right people, and focused on solving real problems.

Every role matters, but not because of fancy titles or tight control. It matters because of how we help each other move forward.

When we get the team setup right, outcomes follow. And that is when the real magic happens.

Products do not change the world — teams do.