Facilitated By TJ.
In today’s fast-moving digital product space, small cross-functional teams are often expected to do more with less. Designers are thinking like product managers, developers are engaging in UX decisions, and product owners are advocating for design system consistency.
This evolution reflects a growing need for Distributed Ownership—a dynamic model where responsibilities for product and UI are shared across team roles to enhance agility, clarity, and customer experience.
Our April 2025 event, Distributed Ownership: Navigating Product & UI Responsibilities in Lean Teams, will help Agile practitioners explore how to successfully implement and thrive within this collaborative structure.
Why Distributed Ownership Matters
Traditional team models often create silos: product defines what, design defines how, and engineering delivers. In lean environments, this approach leads to handoff delays, diluted ownership, and missed customer insights.
Distributed ownership helps teams:
- Foster faster decision-making
- Encourage deeper empathy for the user
- Align product thinking across roles
- Build trust and shared accountability
For insight into lean team culture, check out Basecamp’s take on flat structure.
What You’ll Learn in This Session
1. Defining Shared Responsibilities Without Chaos
Participants will:
- Identify core product and UI responsibilities
- Learn how to prevent overlapping roles from leading to confusion
- Explore real-world examples of healthy distributed ownership
2. Tools for Collaboration Across Disciplines
We’ll introduce collaborative tools like:
- Figma and FigJam for shared design and feedback
- Miro for mapping product goals with UI ideas
- Productboard and Trello for maintaining visibility of ownership
Visit Miro’s Agile workspace templates.
3. Product Thinking for Everyone
This portion emphasizes:
- Helping developers and designers align with product goals
- Encouraging business-minded conversations at the feature level
- Bringing metrics and user feedback into everyday design and dev work
Explore product thinking at Mind the Product.
4. Leadership Without Hierarchy
Learn how to:
- Empower team members to lead decisions
- Rotate roles of responsibility in retrospectives, testing, and releases
- Create psychological safety for team-led initiatives
Explore more with Spotify’s squad model and team health checks.
Who Should Attend?
- Product Owners and Managers
- UX/UI Designers in Agile Teams
- Frontend and Full-Stack Developers
- Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches
How to Prepare for the Session
- Reflect on how decisions are currently made on your team.
- Identify any silos or blockers that affect collaboration.
- Bring a current UI or feature example to discuss during group exercises.
Benefits of Attending
- Clarify responsibilities while strengthening cross-role collaboration
- Learn to navigate lean team dynamics with real-world tools
- Take away actionable techniques to increase team clarity and delivery speed
- Get access to shared templates and examples to apply immediately
Ready to build better products through shared accountability? Join us this April for Distributed Ownership: Navigating Product & UI Responsibilities in Lean Teams and discover how collaborative leadership fuels innovation in lean Agile teams.
