Team & Organizational · master area
Small Team Adaptation
Not every team has a dedicated PO, Designer, Tech Lead, QA, and multiple developers. Some teams are three. Some are two. The chain still applies — the roles are combined, not eliminated. The hat is conscious.
Owners: PO, Tech Lead Phase it lives in: Continuous The corpus principle this enacts: The chain holds because the artifacts are stance-shaped, not person-shaped.
Where it lives in the chain
How to do this
A person wearing two hats switches consciously, not unconsciously. "I am writing this brief as PO" and "I am reviewing it as QA" are different stances even when they're the same person.
Common combinations that work:
- PO + Designer — the PO does feature briefs and journeys; brings in design help on visual systems and review.
- Senior dev + Tech Lead — the senior dev wears the lead hat in ADRs and pipeline decisions.
- PO + QA — the PO writes amigos themselves; QA review is contracted out for high-risk releases.
What never combines
Incident commander, communicator, investigator. Even on a one-person on-call, the hats switch in time. "Right now I am the commander. I will not investigate for the next ten minutes." When the on-call tries to do all three at once, they do all three badly — and the incident outlasts what it should have.
The hidden risk of small teams
Not missing a role — losing the challenge the missing role would have provided. The PO+Designer who agrees with themselves about the brief never had the technical pushback the absent Tech Lead would have brought. The dev+QA who passes their own scenarios never had the "what if the input is empty" the absent QA would have asked. The small-team discipline is to bring the missing voice in deliberately — async review from a peer, the bi-weekly check-in with the Tech Lead, the periodic Designer audit. The chain holds when the stance is held; it doesn't care who holds it.
Related crafts
- T-Shaped People — the shape small teams need
- Incident Management — where roles must not combine
- Psychological Safety — what hat-switching depends on