Rewired

Chapter 4Figure out what resources you need to achieve what you want

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

—Desmond Tutu

The organizing unit in a digital and AI transformation is the agile pod (sometimes called a squad, scrum, agile team, or cross-functional team). A pod is a cross-disciplinary team of about 5–10 people that owns the design, development, and production of a particular digital product or service for an extended period of time. Delivering the digital roadmap is basically an exercise in figuring out how many, and what type of, agile pods you need to get the job done.

We won't go into detail here about how these agile pods work (you can find that in Chapter 13). However, it's important to cover the basic construct of agile pods with a focus on roles because you cannot complete the digital roadmap if you don't specify the resources needed.

Pod composition

Agile pods have a product owner (also sometimes called a product manager or pod owner), a scrum master,¹ a group of relevant digital technologists, and business subject matter experts (see Exhibit 4.1). Most pod members are dedicated 100% to the pod because that's the most effective way to achieve high-development velocity (although there are some exceptions for certain shared resources, such as solution architects and agile coaches).

Recent research has shown that having the team working together in a physical location is preferable ...