Squads, pods, cells? Making sense of Agile teams

Some of the terms can be — and are indeed — used to represent the same concepts, but that is not always the case.

Look at some of the options for organizing workers:

A Team is a small group of people tasked with the development and maintenance of a specific product, project or initiative. They work in sprints, or short segments of time — usually mere weeks in the world of software development, developing a new piece of their product at the end of that time.

Different sources give varying details of the origin of the term Team with the capital T, but many point to the Scrum Guide as having solidified the definition. A Team generally has three to nine members working with a Scrum master, who guides the team and a product owner. The Team shares accountability for the product’s success.

A squad is similar to a Team. The term, as it applies to organizing workers, comes from the music streaming service Spotify, which developed its own version of Scrum, now commonly known as the Spotify Model.

“Spotify uses Scrum, but they renamed Team to be a squad, because, No. 1, they wanted to create a level of ownership, and, No. 2, they wanted to add their own nuances to Scrum,” said Dave West, CEO and product owner of Scrum.org, which provides comprehensive training, assessments and certifications.

The Spotify Model also created guilds, chapters and tribes. A tribe consists of multiple teams, all of which work on products in the same functional area.

Meanwhile, individual workers also belong to guilds — communities where people share information around similar interest — and chapters, where people who do similar work can come together to hone their expertise, in addition to working in their squads. Workers can, in fact, belong to more than one guild or chapter.

“These chapters and guilds make the ability to interact more flexible,” Groll said.

Team and squad are the most commonly used terms for the small groups of individuals working in an Agile fashion, but there are a slew of other terms, such as cells and packs, used to describe groups of workers. Experts said these terms generally represent the same concepts as Team, squad, chapter and guild, with some of these alternative terms being developed “The spirit is very much the same, but there are some subtle differences,” Groll said.

For example, Capgemini, in an article from March 2017, used team and pool to describe groups of people, with a team consisting of workers “with a full set of complementary skills” and a pool being a group of workers “with the same skill set.” A pod, it said, is a “cross-functional and multidisciplinary team.”