The Scrum Team: Size, Cross-Functionality and Self-Management

The fundamental unit of Scrum is a small team of people: one Scrum Master, one Product Owner and the Developers. Within a Scrum Team there are no sub-teams and no hierarchies. It is a cohesive unit of professionals focused on one objective at a time — the Product Goal. The Scrum Guide describes three accountabilities, not job titles: a person's job title in the organization does not matter inside the team.

Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members together have all the skills needed to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing: they decide internally who does what, when and how. The team is responsible for all product-related activities — collaborating with stakeholders, verification, maintenance, operation, experimentation, research and development, and anything else that might be needed. The organization structures and empowers the team to manage its own work, and the team works at a sustainable pace.

A Scrum Team is small enough to stay nimble and large enough to complete significant work within a Sprint — typically 10 or fewer people. Smaller teams communicate better and are more productive. If a team becomes too large, it should consider reorganizing into multiple cohesive Scrum Teams, each focused on the same product. Those teams share the same Product Goal, Product Backlog and Product Owner.

Study focus: the 2020 Scrum Guide replaced "self-organizing" with "self-managing" and removed the separate "Development Team" — there is one Scrum Team. Answers that create a team lead, a sub-team for testing or a manager inside the team are not Scrum.