k8mak
Get in touch
ServicesBlogResume

Team & Roles

IntermediatePrompts3 min

Use this section when: You're joining an engagement and want to understand what your role looks like week to week, you're forming a new team, or you're explaining to a client how the team is structured.

Journey fit

  • Brand-new Artisan: Read your role guide first, then review pairing expectations.
  • Returning Artisan: Use this section to realign role boundaries as engagements evolve.
  • Client-facing Artisan: Use this language to explain balanced-team collaboration to clients.

Balanced teams

Artium teams are built around a simple principle: product, design, and engineering are equals.

No single discipline "owns" the product. The PM doesn't hand requirements to engineering. The designer doesn't work in isolation and reveal at the end. Engineers don't just execute tickets. Everyone contributes to understanding users, shaping what gets built, and delivering working software.

This structure works because each role brings a distinct lens:

Role Primary lens Key question
Product Manager Value and viability Are we building the right thing?
Designer Usability and experience Can people actually use this?
Engineer Feasibility and quality Can we build this well?

When all three lenses are active throughout the process — not just at handoff points — teams build better software faster.

For the full balanced teams practice guide — including team composition rules, voice-and-vote model, anti-patterns, and AI-assisted facilitation — see the Balanced Teams Guide.

Role guides

Role Guide Use this when...
Product Manager product-manager.md You're a PM on an engagement and want to know your week-to-week responsibilities, tools, and agent workflows
Designer designer.md You're a designer and want to know how your work connects to iteration planning, pairing, and validation
Engineer engineer.md You're an engineer and want to understand pairing, TDD, and CI/CD expectations on an Artium engagement

How roles interact across the iteration

Monday         Tue-Thu                    Friday
─────────────  ─────────────────────────  ─────────────────
PLANNING       BUILD                      DEMO + RETRO
All roles      PM ↔ Design: discovery     All roles demo
together       Design ↔ Eng: refinement   All roles retro
               Eng ↔ Eng: pairing
               PM ↔ Eng: criteria review
               Everyone: standups

No role works in isolation for more than a few hours. The pairing configurations keep everyone aligned:

AI across all roles

Every role on an Artium engagement uses AI agents as part of their daily work. The modes differ by role:

Role Primary AI modes Examples
PM Drafter, Analyst Story writing, backlog analysis, stakeholder prep, research synthesis
Designer Analyst, Drafter Research synthesis, competitive analysis, design validation planning
Engineer Navigator, Test Author TDD++, code review, debugging, pinning tests for legacy code

See agentic-pm/ for PM-specific agent workflows. See practices/pairing/human-agent.md for the general human-agent pairing guide.

Roles
Designer