Reading/Roles and responsibilities

Reading teams are comprised of the following roles, which are defined by their associated responsibilities.

Product Owner
The product owner, in a nutshell, is ultimately responsible for the product or service to be delivered. The product owner is responsible for:
 * Providing vision for the product or service being developed
 * Being the single point of escalation for contending priorities among stakeholders
 * Managing the product road map
 * Making final decisions about trade-offs when desired functionality, or scope, exceeds the capacity of the team
 * Defining the target constituent for iterations, releases, and the overall product
 * Making final decision about whether or not work done on stories is complete ('acceptance'). NOTE- bugs and technical/non-user-facing stories are treated differently from user-facing work:
 * if a bug is resolved in Phabricator, it is automatically considered "signed off"
 * for tech tasks, whoever merges the task has indicated that they sign off on it
 * Doing the work of determining what features the team should work on in order to achieve our user, community, and Foundation goals. This is done in collaboration with the team
 * Making sure that our products have a coherent, compelling user experience

Because the product owner has the final say over prioritization, there should be only one person acting as product owner.

Scrum Master
The Scrum Master is primarily responsible for maintaining the team's process and ensuring the team delivers what is expected from the product owner. Responsibilities include:
 * Evolving team/agile capacity
 * Removing blockers
 * Leading/coordinating/facilitating whole team in story delivery
 * Facilitating meetings
 * Optimizing process
 * Coordinating project work streams
 * Helping to manage project/iteration scope
 * Managing external dependencies
 * Escalating risks/issues
 * Reporting on progress

Quality Assurance Analyst (QA)
QA oversees the quality of the product. Responsibilities include:
 * Producing test cases/scenarios
 * Manual testing when not automated/automatable
 * Maintaining regression test suite
 * Integration testing
 * Exploratory testing
 * Assisting in acceptance criteria definition
 * Training and otherwise working with engineers in best-practices for assuring code and product quality

User Experience (UX) Designer
The UX Designer defines how users will interact with the product. Responsibilities include:
 * Gathering data to assess needs/requirements of users
 * Proposing designs to define how users will interact with the functionality of the product (including designs of UX in general, and the product's interface in particular)
 * Providing design expertise and guidance to engineers and QA during code writing and testing
 * Ensuring that the product is not only useful, but usable as well
 * Assisting in narrative and user story development, particularly in the delivery of development-ready design assets and/or prototypes
 * Leading usability testing and logging associated findings

Community Relations Specialist
The Community Relations Specialist:
 * Write user documentation, FAQs, blogs, for features and products so that users are aware of the objective and intention of features
 * Serving as the voice of the community during feature and product planning. Might run surveys or use other mechanism to measure user satisfaction/requests.
 * Shaping and executing community to team communications and vice versa

Engineering
During Q1 FY 2017-2018 (July - September 2017), the engineering group in Readers formulated and discussed the following RACI matrix to describe a number of its core activities.

A short guide to RACI:
 * Responsible (does the work)
 * Accountable (ensures it happens, on the hook if it doesn't)
 * Consulted (is sought for input)
 * Informed (is notified)