Freshwater Academy Squad Capability Model v0.3

This is a draft (work in progress) capability model for cross functional product development teams across Product, Engineering, Design and Delivery disciplines.

We use this model to help product teams define roles and responsibilities, conduct capability assessments and create learning and development opportunities through training, communities of practice, mentoring and coaching programs.

Note this is a list of capabilities, not roles: a single person on a team would typically contribute many capabilities to the team.

Input and feedback is welcome.

Summary

Product Strategy - product strategy, product vision, product goals/OKRs, product roadmap and product performance

Stakeholder Management - stakeholder communication and engagement

Product Discovery - user research, customer interviews, problem, solution and assumption validation

Product Backlog - elaboration, story writing, structure and refinement

Product Design - visual, interaction, content, usability and accessibility design and design systems

Planning / Facilitation - planning, forecasting, process and facilitation

People Management - 1:1s, empowerment, safety, feedback, recognition, hiring, onboarding, team structure, performance and development

Technology Strategy - tech strategy, tech stack, architecture, tech practices and policies

Product Engineering - coding, unit testing, tech design, integration and deployment

Quality Engineering - test specification, automated testing, UAT and A/B testing

Platform Engineering - shared platforms, services, libraries and developer experience

DevOps - infrastructure, reliability, security and privacy

Data – data analysis, data science, data engineering, data platforms and data governance

Product Strategy

Product Discovery - e.g Teresa Torres’ Continuous Product Discovery

Product Strategy - e.g Gibson Biddle Netflix P roduct Strategy, Ash Maurya Lean Canvas, Simon Wardley’s Mapping, Market Research, Go to Market

Product Vision - e.g Christian Strunk SumUp Product Vision, Amazon PRFAQ, Paul Caroli Lean Inception

Product Goals / OKRs - e.g Melissa Perri Target Condition , Scrum Product Goal, John Cutler North Star Framework, OKRs

Opportunity Assessment - e.g Marty Cagan Opportunity Assessment, Jeff Patton Opportunity Canvas

Investment Decisions - e.g Ryan Singer Basecamp Betting Table

Product Roadmap - e.g Jason Doherty Outcome Based Roadmap

Product Performance Measurement & Optimisation

Commercials - e.g Pricing, Financial Modelling

Domain / Industry Knowledge

Stakeholder Management

Customer Engagement

Stakeholder Engagement

Pitching / Presenting / Storytelling

Influence / Negotiation

Collaboration

Communications

Technology Strategy

Tech Strategy & Governance

Platform Strategy

Test Strategy

Tech Standards/Policies

Tech Decision Making

Tech Architecture / Tech Stack

Tech vendor management

Custodianship / Contribution Model

XP / DevOps practices

Planning / Facilitation

Planning - e.g Release Planning, Sprint Planning

Forecasting / Estimating - e.g Probabilistic Forecasting

Capacity planning

Reporting

Dependency Management

Continuous Improvement - e.g Retrospectives

Methods - e.g Agile/Scrum, Lean/Kanban

Facilitation - e.g Planning, Reviews, Inceptions

People Management

1:1s

Empowerment

Coaching

Feedback

Safety / Respect

Culture / Behaviours

Conflict

Performance / Promotion

Recruitment / Retention

Onboarding

Learning and Development

Team Structure / Topologies

Product Discovery

Research Strategy

Customer Interviewing / User Research

Journey and Experience Mapping

Participant Recruitment

Opportunity Mapping and Assessment

Solution Ideation and Assessment

Assumption Mapping and Testing

Prototyping / Wireframing

Data Analysis

Discovery Reviews

Product Design

Visual Design

Interaction Design

Content Design

Usability Testing

Accessibility

Ethics

Design Systems

Product Backlog

Business Analysis

Elaboration / Story Writing / Shaping

Sizing

Splitting

Visualisation / Mapping - e.g Jeff Patton’s Story Mapping

Structure / Hierarchy

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance Testing

Product Engineering

Tech Design - e.g DDD

Unit Testing - e.g TDD

Coding Front End - e.g React, CSS, HTML

Coding Back End - e.g C#, Node, Java/Kotlin, SQL, REST/JSON APIs

Coding Cloud - e.g AWS, Azure, Cloudflare

Coding Mobile - e.g iOS, Android

Pairing/Mobbing

Continuous Integration

Continuous Delivery / Deployment

Refactoring

Tech Documentation

Quality Engineering

Collaborative Specification – e.g Example Mapping / Acceptance Criteria

Test Automation - e.g BDD ATDD Cucumber

Exploratory Testing

Integration Testing

Acceptance Testing

A/B Testing

Feature Flags

Platform Engineering

Platform as a Product

Developer Experience

Self-Service Libraries / APIs / Tools

Platform Discoverability / Documentation

DevOps

Infrastructure / Cloud / Serverless

Continuous Delivery / Deployment

Monitoring / Observability

On Call / Pager Policies

Incident Management

SLOs / Reliability Policies

Security Policies

Privacy Policies

Ops Documentation

Data

Data Analysis / Business Intelligence

Data Science / Machine Learning

Data Engineering / Data Modelling – e.g ETL, Data Vault, Star Schema

Data Governance - e.g privacy, data protection, data policies, standards

Data Architecture - e.g service architecture, data mesh, data lake

Data Platform - e.g Storage, Transformation, Transport

Data Management - e.g metadata, data quality