Cross-functional Scrum Teams Don’t Need Every Skill
The Goal of Scrum Teams If you look at the definition of Scrum, you will know that teams should be skilled to achieve the objectives in every kind of work. Every member of the team should have the skills that can help in achieving the sprint goals.
Emerson Cole
- March 9, 2025
The Goal of Scrum Teams
If you look at the definition of Scrum, you will know that teams should be skilled to achieve the objectives in every kind of work. Every member of the team should have the skills that can help in achieving the sprint goals.
The perfect case is that the team should have all kinds of skills, including front-end, back-end, database management, security, DevOps, UX, and QA. The team has a balance of skills and cumulative experience; there are domain experts as well as generalists.
It is possible, and maybe it is so, but practically, this is not necessary and not even advisable.
It is not necessary to have every skill in every Sprint.
Some skills are specialised, and they don’t need to be needed in every Sprint, such as:
- Compliance audits or Security reviews are required quarterly
- Database administrator is not required full-time for every team
Not every skill can be expected from every team. It takes years to develop expertise in some skills. It is quite clear that it is not optimal to distribute deep expertise in each team, which can lead to inefficiency and redundancy.
Role of shared services
Now, when a team does not have all the skills, then organisations form a Shared Services Team, which takes care of this work. These teams deal with specialised areas such as:
- Security: Security and compliance audits
- UX: Research, wireframing, and usability testing
- DB: Database management, Query Optimisation, and performance checks
- DevOps: CI/CD pipeline management
Now, these Shared Services teams do not work as a separate team in which their backlog is managed. Their own scrum master and product owner write the requirements. If the DevOps engineer, DBA, and UX designer are on the same team, then their scrum will be meaningless. Their work is not interdependent, and it cannot be shown in terms of unified sprint deliverables, even in the sprint review meeting.
Better approach – loaning specialists
Now, a better way could be to temporarily include such shared services specialists in the team when needed. They should participate in sprint planning just like other team members and contribute to the deliverable.
Meaning of collective capability
According to the Scrum definition, it is important here that “collectively” does not mean that every team member has every kind of skill set or every team has every kind of expertise. But “together” teams should have the required skills when needed.
So organisations have to make sure that the skills required by a team are available to that team at that time. Not that every team has every skill at every time.
How to create balance?
The team should be cross-functional at its core so that it can deliver value independently in a sprint.
But it is also very important to note that if a team repeatedly needs shared services and its work is delayed, organisations must focus on this and adjust.
So, to make the teams self-sufficient, it is not necessary that each one has every skill. Rather, this has to be handled smartly, and shared services have to be brought to work. Instead of forming a separate scrum team of skill specialists, it is better to add them on a temporary basis to the relevant team when needed.
The best way to enable agility in the team is to design the teams in a way that makes the most sense.