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How to Create a Team Charter: Template and Guide for Engineering and Product Teams

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High-performing teams don't happen by accident. They're built through intentional conversations about how to work together effectively.

Creating alignment isn't about one-off workshops. It's about clarity that sticks. A team charter gives agile teams the shared understanding they need to work better together, especially as teams grow, change, and evolve how they work. Without one, ambiguity creeps in, especially in remote or distributed environments where body language and hallway conversations aren't an option.

TL;DR

  • A team charter is a shared agreement that defines how a team works together.
  • It helps build trust, align expectations, and reduce friction.
  • Creating one involves four stages: define purpose, agree on behaviours, map workflows, and embed the document.
  • It evolves with the team and supports onboarding, retros, and continuous improvement.

What is a Team Charter?

A team charter is a living document co-created by the team. It outlines the team's shared understanding around purpose, values, responsibilities, and ways of working. It sets the tone for how people communicate, collaborate, and make decisions.

Think of it as a blueprint for a high-performing team: aspirational, but grounded in the daily realities of team life, and aligned with agile ceremonies like stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives that reinforce shared understanding. It reduces duplication, limits confusion, and gives structure to how we operate - even when the unexpected shows up.

Benefits of a Team Charter for Agile Teams

At its core, a team charter addresses the fundamental questions that cause most team dysfunction:

  • What is our purpose as a team? Why do we exist?
  • What is within the scope of our team?
  • What outcomes are we accountable for?
  • How do we treat each other as team members?
  • How do we make decisions and communicate?
  • What are our individual roles and responsibilities?
  • How do we celebrate success?

What a Well-Crafted Team Charter Can Unlock

1. Clarity and Alignment

A team charter serves as a clear roadmap that defines the team's mission, goals, roles, and responsibilities. It ensures everyone understands how their work contributes to team success.

2. Better Decision-Making

When responsibilities and communication protocols are clear, decisions are made faster and more consistently.

3. Improved Communication

Establishing communication norms upfront ensures smoother knowledge sharing and transparency.

4. Accountability and Ownership

Team members know what they're responsible for, fostering commitment and initiative.

5. Trust and Team Cohesion

The collaborative process of creating a charter builds trust and empathy, and strengthens team dynamics.

6. Continuous Improvement

Team charters encourage feedback and reflection, evolving with your team over time.

7. Streamlined Onboarding

Team charter serves as a vital guide for new team members, offering clear insight into the team's norms, values, and workflows, accelerating their integration and boosting early productivity.

8. Living Reference Document

The charter acts as a reference tool that keeps everyone grounded and aligned as the team changes.

Four Practical Steps to Build a Team Charter

The team charter process is typically split into four interactive sessions. Each phase builds on the last and creates the trust, clarity, and psychological safety needed for the next.

Phase 1: Define Purpose and People

The team's mission refers to the objective or goal that a team is set to achieve. It is a clear and concise statement that defines the team's purpose and the value it aims to deliver.

Start by co-creating the team's mission statement. Team members contribute by answering: "What value do we deliver? What impact do we want to have?"

Everyone shares their input, then the team votes on the mission statements that resonate most. You can even combine parts from several to create the final version.

Once established, the mission should be displayed publicly where everyone can see it and team members can reference it.

Team Charter Template - Mission Statement | Easy Agile

Then we go deeper, with Personal Operating Instructions (POIs). This phase focuses on understanding team members as individuals. Each person answers questions like:

  • What do you love about your job?
  • What motivates you?
  • How do you like to work?
  • When do you work best?
  • What do you want help to look like?

This helps us build empathy and challenge assumptions. It makes team members understand behaviours and uncover ways to support one another.

Team Charter Template - Personal Operating Instructions POI | Easy Agile

Phase 2: Create a Working Agreement

A working agreement is a team-designed agreement for an aspirational set of values, behaviours and social norms. Think of it as a vision for how it would be to work in an incredibly safe and powerful team.

This is where the real power lies, where you get specific about operations. Through a mix of guided reflection and group synthesis, the team explores questions like:

  • What makes a great team vs. a terrible team?
  • How do we communicate?
  • How do we make decisions?
  • What are our top responsibilities?
  • What are our daily rhythms (e.g., stand-ups, reviews)?
Team Charter, Working Agreement, Social Contract Template - Great teams vs. Terrible teams| Easy Agile

And don’t stop at logistics, go deeper:

  • How do we give feedback?
  • What do we do when someone’s stuck?
  • How do we balance collaboration and deep work?
  • How do we share knowledge?
  • How do we run meetings?
  • How do we support remote or hybrid work?
  • How do we protect focus time?
  • How do we resolve disagreements?
Team Charter, Working Agreement, Social Contract Template | Easy Agile
Team Charter, Working Agreement, Social Contract Template - Maintaining the Agreement | Easy Agile

From this, draft short, memorable working agreement statements. For example: "We default to asynchronous communication whenever possible," or "We commit to reviewing pull requests within 24 hours." Themes like "Diverse opinions welcome" or "Refactoring is a first-class citizen" should emerge.

💡 Tip: If your team uses Easy Agile TeamRhythm, you can incorporate these agreements into planning and retro directly.

Here are two examples of working agreements:

Team Charter, Working Agreement, Social Contract Example | Easy Agile
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Team Charter, Working Agreement, Social Contract Template - Example 1 | Easy Agile
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Phase 3: Map an Operational Agreement

Next, turn principles into rituals. Visualise your delivery flow using tools like Kanban boards, swimlanes, or service blueprints, whatever format helps your team see the full picture clearly:

  • Who leads each stage?
  • What’s working?
  • What’s broken?
  • What needs to be true for work to move forward?

Capture frictions around unclear ownership or ambiguous definitions. This surfaces hidden blockers and leads to better alignment.

💡 Tip: Consider using a collaborative tool like Miro, Easy Agile Programs, or whiteboarding sessions to map your current process together.
Team Charter, Working Agreement, Social Contract Template - Operational Agreement | Easy Agile
Team Charter, Working Agreement, Social Contract Template - Operational Agreement Workflow | Easy Agile

Phase 4: Make It Stick

A charter only works if it lives in your team’s daily rhythm. Otherwise, it risks becoming 'shelfware' that gets created once and forgotten. Keep it active, visible, and revisited to maintain its impact.

  • Share and communicate: Make it accessible and visible.
  • Live by the charter: Role model the behaviours you agreed on.
  • Review and update regularly: Revisit and evolve it as your team changes.
  • Use as a reference: Ground retrospectives and decisions in it.
  • Reflect often: Use it to discuss what’s working and what’s not.

💡 Tip: Add your charter as a living page in your team workspace (like Confluence) and link to it in your planning tools.

Onboarding New Team Members with a Charter

When someone new joins the team, it's time to review the charter. Here’s a step-by-step onboarding process:

  1. Initial walkthrough: A team lead introduces the charter and context.
  2. Time to absorb: The new member reads and reflects.
  3. Team review: The team invites their feedback and updates the charter together.

This creates buy-in and strengthens psychological safety.

💡 Tip: Schedule a 30-minute team check-in with each new hire after their first two weeks to revisit the charter together.

The Foundation of High Performance

A team charter isn’t just a document. It’s a shared commitment to how you work together. It evolves as your team does, helping you navigate change and stay aligned.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that culture isn’t declared. It’s designed, together.

Whether forming a new team or elevating an existing one, your charter is a powerful first step toward intentional, aligned collaboration.

Suggested Next Step

Looking to embed your team charter into your team's everyday rhythm? Easy Agile apps like TeamRhythm and Programs help teams turn working agreements into action by aligning daily rituals such as sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives, and PI planning.

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  • Agile Best Practice

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    At Easy Agile, conversations with our customers frequently surface familiar challenges. While each organisation is unique, the core struggles of collaboration are shared. To protect the privacy of the teams we spoke to, we’ve anonymised all quotes. But every insight is real, direct from the people doing the work.

    This post is for anyone navigating the complexity of scaled collaboration, whether you're leading a team or working within one. Sometimes the hardest part is seeing the problem clearly. These are the patterns teams are running into, the questions they’re wrestling with, and the cracks that emerge when planning, alignment, and communication break down. Understanding and acknowledging these issues is the first step toward solving them.

    Here’s what teams are experiencing and the key questions they’re grappling with as they scale collaboration.

    TL;DR – Common collaboration challenges in scale-ups and enterprises:

    • Teams struggle with communication and alignment, especially when working across multiple teams or departments
    • Managing cross-team dependencies is a significant challenge, often causing delays and requiring frequent coordination
    • Capacity planning and skill allocation are difficult, particularly when teams have to balance project work with ongoing operational tasks
    • Teams face challenges in breaking down work effectively and maintaining visibility of progress across different teams
    • Frequent changes in priorities and scope creep disrupt team planning and execution
    • There are difficulties in translating high-level strategy into actionable team priorities and objectives
    • Teams struggle with effective retrospectives and continuous improvement processes

    What breaks down in cross-team communication?

    Communication challenges tend to intensify with scale. As soon as multiple teams are involved, misalignment becomes more likely. A Senior Product Manager from a global HR tech firm described a pattern many teams will recognise:

    "One of the main themes I heard in conversations with leadership was the lack of process, transparency, visibility, and dependency tracking. It’s always been manual across teams. We’ve done a really good job, but there’s an opportunity to do better."

    Another team member highlighted how this disconnect tends to grow over time:

    "At the start of each quarter, our conversations are strategic and cross-functional, involving sales and strategy teams. But as we dive deeper into execution, communication shrinks down to daily engineering huddles, and essential alignment details often get lost."

    The problem isn't a lack of communication, but rather a shift in its focus. When delivery takes centre stage, strategic context gets sidelined. When teams move into execution mode, that shift in communication cadence creates blind spots across departments, leading to confusion, duplicated work, or misaligned outputs.

    Why is managing dependencies across teams so difficult?

    Dependencies create friction when they aren’t visible or clearly owned. Coordination across teams can be derailed by unclear sequencing, late handovers, or competing timelines. An Agile Coach at a financial institution shared:

    "We had to run bi-weekly cross-program dependency calls just to stay on top of what was blocking who. We just list dependencies manually, there isn’t any unified visibility. At the ART level, it’s a mix of RTEs, Scrum Masters, and team members trying to link things, but beyond that, it falls apart"

    A delivery leader at a global credit bureau reinforced the limitations of existing tools:

    "I’ve never successfully been able to really tackle dependency visualization and put a process around that. It's always been manual. When I'm speaking to an executive, that means something... But when I'm speaking to someone on an agile team, it changes as it rolls up...Without proper plugins, even a robust tool like Jira struggles to provide clear dependency visuals. Planning becomes complicated quickly, leaving teams stuck."

    Dependency risk increases when shared work isn’t tracked or visualised in a way that’s accessible to all stakeholders. Teams need to see not just their own work, but how it connects with others. Teams need more than awareness - they need shared visibility, clarity on ownership, and consistent ways to plan around dependencies.

    How do teams manage capacity when demands keep shifting?

    Planning team capacity isn’t just about headcount, but also about competing demands. Teams are often asked to deliver roadmap initiatives while supporting legacy systems, resolving production issues, or addressing technical debt. A product leader from a cybersecurity company shared:

    "We’re always trying to achieve a lot with limited resources, and it makes roadmapping really difficult. We’ve made progress in estimating the team's bandwidth more accurately by looking at what they actually delivered last quarter. But we still hit the same issue - too many topics, too little time."

    Another team shared how they introduced tighter prioritisation controls using a third-party tool, but even rigid structures have their limits:

    "We use XXX as a source of truth for prioritisation. We have around 80 different initiatives prioritised from 1 to 80 of importance... no meeting can be scheduled if the project is not approved in the tool."

    This helped formalise approvals and reduce noise, but it also revealed a deeper issue. Even with a strict gating process, the volume of initiatives stayed high, and prioritisation alone couldn’t solve for limited capacity. Clearer structures don’t automatically reduce the demand on teams or ease delivery expectations. That tension persists unless strategic scope is also narrowed.

    What makes work breakdown and visibility so hard to maintain?

    Breaking down initiatives into independent, testable stories is not always straightforward, especially when scope is uncertain or spans months. A software engineer working across multiple teams explained:

    "Breaking work down is hard - some teams still think in layers. They say, ‘This only delivers value when the whole thing’s done.’ On top of that, we often run big planning in a five-hour day or stretch it awkwardly over two days. Third parties and shared services don’t get folded into teams, which makes breakdown and clarity harder."

    Large epics often outlive the context in which they were created. As scope evolves, teams may struggle to maintain clear acceptance criteria and shared understanding.

    An Agile Coach reinforced how hard it is to keep sight of progress:

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    As work grows more complex, clarity suffers. Without reliable visibility, work risks stalling or repeating unnecessarily. Teams need tools, systems, and shared language to ensure breakdowns don’t get lost in the shuffle and progress remains meaningful.

    Why do changing priorities and scope creep derail plans?

    Frequent priority changes and scope creep disrupt planning discipline. They often signal deeper issues: vague goals, shifting leadership expectations, or unclear ownership. One product leader summed it up:

    "Priorities used to switch constantly - sometimes halfway through a project, we’d have 30% done and then get pulled into something else. That context-switching really hurts. It demoralises engineers who were already deep into a feature. We had to raise it in a full engineering and product retrospective just to get some stability."

    Another shared the toll it takes on delivery teams:

    "We often found ourselves mid-quarter pivoting to newly emerging business needs, without fully aligning on what gets dropped. That lack of clarity meant engineers felt whiplash, and team goals kept shifting."

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    What stops teams from aligning strategy to daily work?

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    Another added:

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    Without alignment between leadership priorities and team-level execution, valuable work can feel directionless. Objectives become outputs rather than outcomes.

    What holds back meaningful retrospectives?

    Retrospectives are intended to surface learning. But without consistent follow-through, they risk becoming routine. One Agile Coach shared how to keep them practical:

    "We’ve tried tools where you just send a link and everyone rates how hard it was to get something done. But too often, it ends up with one person speaking and everyone else just agreeing. We’re trying to avoid the loudest voice dominating the retro. It’s still a challenge to get real, reflective conversations."

    Another shared the risk of retro fatigue:

    "To track action items consistently isn't easy... I have to toggle down and look at each one, which can make things cumbersome when ensuring certain behaviours have stuck...Effective retrospectives should surface recurring issues, not just review the recent past. Discussing ongoing challenges helps teams proactively tackle problems and move forward."

    The barrier is rarely the ceremony - it’s the follow-up. Teams need lightweight ways to track retro actions, validate changes, and revisit unresolved pain points.

    Where to focus

    Improving collaboration means addressing the systems and habits that hold teams back:

    • Keep strategic conversations active, not just at quarterly planning.
    • Visualise and track cross-team dependencies clearly.
    • Protect capacity for both roadmap work and operational stability.
    • Break work into testable, clearly defined pieces.
    • Reinforce the connection between business goals and delivery priorities.
    • Make retrospective actions visible and measurable.

    The teams we speak to aren’t struggling because they lack process. They’re navigating complexity. The opportunity lies in simplifying where it matters and supporting teams with the clarity to make progress, together.

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    • Easy Agile Roadmaps gives every team a simple, shared timeline view, so they can prioritise and sequence work with strategic context.
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    Six Tips for Improving Team Collaboration

    The 17th State of Agile Report shared that 93% of executives thought that their teams could do the same amount of work in half the time, if their teams collaborated better.

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    What we do know is that improving team collaboration has benefits and that improved collaboration is a key benefit of effective agile practices.

    So if you think your team could work more effectively, here are six tips for improving team collaboration that we think will make your working life better, and help you deliver for your customers.

    1. Agile Teams Are Cross-Functional

    Cross-functional teams are the backbone of agile collaboration. It's Agile 101:

    The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

    Manifesto for Agile Software Development

    Ideally, your agile team should be able to deliver work independently. The skills and expertise of your team should allow you to handle diverse tasks without creating dependencies on other teams. You can take ownership of the software you're delivering.

    The benefit of organizing into cross-functional teams is a greater shared understanding of your project, where you can each see how the pieces fit together. This type of collaboration supports the efficient flow of work and ensures that knowledge and skills are consistently shared.

    2. Take an Iterative Approach

    Or to put it another way, make it easier to fail fast, so your team can learn why, and correct your course. By breaking down large projects into manageable increments, your team can focus on delivering small, functional parts of working software at regular intervals. This approach goes hand-in-hand with continual feedback from users, ensuring that issues are uncovered quickly and dealt with just as fast. This shared team focus on user feedback, and the shared purpose and collaboration that comes with it, is a key benefit of agile development.

    3. Maintain Regular and Transparent Communication

    Daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and planning meetings are all designed to foster regular and clear communication. You and your team should see these meetings as an opportunity to share ideas, discuss progress and blockers, and collaborate. If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.

    If your daily stand-up is nothing more than a shopping list of tasks, then you're doing it wrong.

    Someone who has wasted too much time in shopping-list meetings.

    Beyond team meetings, clear communication is important anywhere the details of your work are shared. Agile tools like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provide a central platform for prioritizing work and tracking progress. With a central source of truth that everyone can access to understand goals, priorities, and team commitment, collaboration can be more effective, keeping the team aligned and focused.

    4. Conduct Team Retrospectives

    Hot take: regular retrospectives are the most important agile practice your team can adopt.

    Team retrospectives provide a structured opportunity to reflect on your work and discuss how it can be done better next time. This is team-led improvement because you and your team are in the driver's seat. Encouraging honest and open discussions during retrospectives helps build trust among team members and fosters a collaborative mindset. By continuing to work on processes and behaviors, you and your team can improve your performance over time and make your working life better.

    5. Use Collaboration Tools

    The right tools can make a big difference in team collaboration. The best tools provide a reliable source of truth that the whole team can access, in a place where the whole team will access it. It's a simple concept; a shared understanding of the work is supported by shared and willing access to the same information.

    Choose a tool that makes it easy for you and your team to access information and keep it updated. If you're already working in Jira, an integration like Easy Agile TeamRhythm provides a better view of your work in a story map format, with goals, objectives, and team commitment all made clear. Team retrospective boards are attached to each sprint (or spun up as required for Kanban teams) so you have your team-led ideas for improvement tightly connected to the work in Jira.

    No matter which tool you choose, make sure it will facilitate better alignment, streamline your workflows, and provide a clear picture of roadblocks and progress. By using collaboration tools effectively, your team stays organized, focused, and connected, no matter where each member is located.

    6. Build a Positive Team Culture

    It may sound obvious, but a positive team culture is essential for effective collaboration. Creating an environment where team members feel valued, respected, and motivated, encourages the psychological safety they need to share their great ideas, learn from missteps, and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.

    High-performing teams recognize the achievements of others, share constructive feedback, and support practices that lead to a healthy work-life balance. Make it regular, and keep it authentic. A positive culture not only improves team dynamics but also boosts overall productivity and job satisfaction.

    Successful Team Collaboration

    Effective collaboration can be the difference between your team achieving their goals, or falling short. By embracing agile practices like the regular communication that comes from agile planning meetings, to the learnings that come from taking an interactive approach to development, and creating time for team-led improvement with retrospectives, you can seriously boost your team dynamics.

    Easy Agile TeamRhythm Supports Team Collaboration

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  • Workflow

    Should you form cross-functional agile teams?

    Should you form cross-functional agile teams?

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    • Communication, collaboration, and employee engagement are often better in cross-functional teams.
    • By iteratively testing solutions quickly, cross-functional teams can boost productivity, cut costs, and deliver better results.
    • There may be bumps along the road before a newly formed cross-functional team matures and reaches its potential, but you can take steps to help them succeed.

    "The two most urgent reasons for adopting Agile are the speed and flexibility required by working environments that continue to be bother unpredictable and volatile." State of Agile Report

    What are cross-functional agile teams?

    Cross-functional agile teams (sometimes known as cross-functional scrum teams) are a key element in any organization’s agile development.

    The team brings together people from across the business with different expertise and skillsets. Together, the team works toward a common goal.

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    "The ability for the team to support each other, collaborate with each other and align to the goal are wonderful ways to measure agile."

    William Rojas, Adaptavist

    What are the benefits of cross-functional agile teams?

    There are many benefits of having cross-functional agile teams in your organization. Here’s our top five.

    1. Cross-functional teams communicate and collaborate better

    Siloed teams can spend many hours a week in unproductive meetings as they negotiate resources and manage conflicting priorities. On the other hand, Agile teams align on goals and objectives from the beginning of each project. This helps make their subsequent meetings brief, productive and transparent. Each person is accountable and empowered to share progress and solve problems. As a result, agile teams are often more engaged and passionate about their work.

    2. Cross-functional teams are responsive

    In silos, each team is responsible for an aspect of a project with limited visibility into what other teams are doing. This can lead to blockers or conflicting priorities, creating rework and delays. They may also find they lack specific skills as the project goes on, leaving teams rushing to fill the gaps and causing further delays. Moving to agile teams means having the necessary skills and resources available, as well as identifying conflicting priorities and blockers early. This helps agile teams rapidly iterate, continually improve, and deliver results.

    3. Cross-functional teams are innovative

    In siloed organizations, employees can get caught up in their departmental group think. The limited exposure to other teams makes employees less likely to question established practises or suggest improvements. In cross-functional agile teams, perspectives from people across multiple teams are shared from the outset. Because people from different skills approach problems in different ways, this can lead to great ideas and business innovation.

    4. Cross-functional teams help the business adapt to change

    With their iterative approach and frequent communication, cross-functional agile teams can problem solve and change directions fast. They don’t face the renegotiation, reprioritization, and delays that can hold siloed teams back. Instead, businesses with cross-functional teams can better respond to changing market and customer needs.

    5. Cross-functional teams consistently focus on the big picture

    Cross-functional agile teams understand the ‘why’ behind the work they’re doing, and they come together with a focus on the customer experience. This shared focus dissolves the barriers between the different functions within the team. Deliverables are mapped to high-level business objectives which deliver greater value to the end-user.

    What are the downsides of cross-functional agile teams?

    If cross-functional teams are done right, there really are no downsides. What organization doesn’t want increased collaboration, innovation, customer focus and faster delivery?

    That said, there can be bumps and conflict as people learn to adapt to the agile mindset – and this is where cross-functional teams can fail to deliver. Here are some of the common challenges large organizations face when moving to cross-functional agile teams:

    • Cultural resistance with people reluctant to let go of the old way of doing things.
    • No clear accountability, leaving teams unable to make quick decisions and people clinging to a sense of ownership over their work.
    • Lack of alignment with goals which can lead to misunderstandings, rework, and potential conflict.

    With this in mind, it may take a little time and support for a newly formed agile team to find its wings.

    "Often the way teams become agile is just by doing it, trying it, and continuing to evolve and committing to that approach. So, if you haven't started - just get started. That's often the biggest struggle."

    William Rojas, Adaptavist

    The first step is to just get started

    Being agile means changing an organization’s processes and people structure, and it can seem like a lot of hard work. But if businesses don’t transform so they can capture the productivity, speed, customer, and employee engagement benefits; they’re at risk of being left behind.

    Cross-functional agile teams can be your key adapting fast and getting ahead. There’s no doubt they can deliver outstanding results – if you take the right steps to set them up for success.

    For concrete advice on how to drive successful cross-functional agile teams and avoid failure, sign up for our free on-demand webinar - ‘Do’s and Don'ts of Agile Teams with Adaptavist’.

    The webinar will take a deep dive into the SAFe agile team together with our partner and SAFe expert Adaptavist.

    Keen to scale agile and form successful cross-functional teams?

    Come along to a free, 40-minute on-demand webinar to find out how