Scrum Team Interview Series: The Introduction

When it comes to how teams work together in a SaaS product environment, Lucid doesn’t have an uncommon method—we work in an Agile environment with Scrum teams. What makes Lucid unique is how our Scrum environment is defined. While this can easily be summed up with the adage that “everyone has a seat at the table,” it’s better to hear directly from our teams how their impact and influence has affected their career growth while working for us.

Our Scrum teams are consistently composed of four key members: Software Engineers, Product Managers, UX Designers, and QA Specialists. Everyone on the team contributes to discussions in planning and retrospectives, and has the opportunity to contribute to other initiatives at Lucid that lie outside of their outlined responsibilities or expectations. Anyone can also have the role of Scrum Master in this setup.

So, if this type of collaboration is possible within our teams, what duties does each member really have? To make sure everyone can get a better understanding of what they do and how they do it, we will be running a series of Scrum team Interviews that will highlight the intricacies of the roles of all four of our key Scrum team members.

But first, let’s break them down: 

Software Engineers

There is so much more to being a Software Engineer at Lucid than just writing code, although they do plenty of that too! Being an engineer at Lucid means you are actively involved from the ideation phase all the way to product launch. We lean heavily on our engineers' input for the design, scope, feasibility, and efficiency of our products. 

Product Managers

Product Managers are the voice of the user for our products here at Lucid. They are in constant contact with our users to determine if they are finding our products valuable and how we can make them even better. This vital information flows throughout the company—from sales and marketing to engineering—to ensure we are providing the products and features that the user really wants and needs. They drive our product development roadmap and help us prioritize what is important for our teams to build next. 

UX Designers/Researchers

Members of our UX Designer team include both designers and researchers. They are responsible for creating and validating designs, maintaining consistency across our suite of products, and maintaining the character of the product. They are part of our product roadmap from beginning to end, and influence how we create and innovate our suite of visual collaboration products.

QA Specialists

Our QA Specialists are manual testers and product experts at Lucid. They are constantly thinking of edge cases and finding connections between parts of the products. They are also responsible for testing pull requests to ensure the quality of our products before they are in the hands of our external users. They are meticulous and passionate about breaking things, so their contribution to our product roadmap from the beginning is vital.

When all four of these key components of our Scrum teams work closely together, the impossible happens. It’s these teams that have been able to release a brand new product from ideation to deployment in four months. It’s these teams that made a solution in Lucidchart an actual product in November of 2021 in the form of Lucidscale.  And it’s these teams that will create the next best thing in our visual collaboration suite.

 Keep an eye out for our interview series to consistently pop up over the course of 2022. And if you have any questions for these teams that you would specifically like answered, post them in the comments, and we will do our best to answer them as we interview our teams!