How to facilitate a team roles and responsibilities workshop

It is beneficial to start any workshop with the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ to save time and head off these sorts of questions:

• What = working together to understand the team’s roles and responsibilities
• Why = to clarify the team’s expectations of one another so that you can work well together
• How = a one hour workshop with the following agenda

Draw a grid up on a whiteboard with enough space to list out the different roles on the team. Leave a space spare for ‘unassigned responsibilities’ — we’ll come back to that later on.

Go around the room and ask each team member to tell you their job role — if you have both Front and Back-End developers you can just list them as “Developer” in the grid — keep it high level. You should end up with something that looks like this:

Each team member writes down the top 3–5 things that they believe they are responsible for in their own role on Post-It notes and then rank them in order of priority. Put these to one side once they’re done.

Now ask each team member to write down what they believe the 1–2 main priorities of each of the other roles on the team are.

Responsibilities that don’t have a clear owner may also come up during this exercise — ask the team to note those down also for discussion later on.

Pick one person to start — your Product Manager, for example. Ask them to read out what they wrote down as their top 3–5 priorities and place them in the relevant square on the grid.

Next, ask each member of the team to read out what they wrote down as the top 1–2 priorities for the Product Manager on the team.

The Product Manager can accept or politely decline the responsibilities that other team members have written down for their role.

If they decline then the team needs to figure out which role that responsibility should be assigned to.

At the end of the exercise it will become clear if the team is aligned or if there are some unassigned responsibilities that need owners. Next steps might include resolving who owns these and following up with the relevant parties who can help to resolve things.

Assign someone to write up the findings and share with the team.