Roles and teams
Squad
Also calledProduct squad, Cross-functional team, Pod
A small, long-lived, cross-functional team, typically engineers plus a product owner or manager and a designer, that owns one part of the product end to end.
The term was popularised by Spotify's 2012 write-up of how it scaled agile teams, which grouped squads into tribes. Many companies now use it, or pod, for any stable team that can ship on its own.
Squad count is a practical way to size a product org: every squad needs someone who owns its backlog, so product headcount grows with the number of squads rather than directly with the number of engineers.
Common mistake
Copying the names without the autonomy. Squads that need sign-off from three other teams to ship anything are squads in name only.