What is a Squad? How cross-functional squads work in product teams
A short explainer on the squad model in agile product organizations, and how I've built and led one at Endress+Hauser.
Published
A “squad” is a small, cross-functional, largely autonomous team built around a product area rather than around a single discipline. Instead of separating business, design, and engineering into departments that hand work off to each other, a squad puts the people who define, design, and build a product together in one team with a shared goal.
The term comes out of the “Spotify model,” where squads are typically grouped into wider “tribes,” with “chapters” connecting people in the same discipline (for example, all UX designers) across squads, and “guilds” as looser, cross-tribe communities of interest (for example, everyone interested in accessibility, or everyone interested in AI tooling). Not every company implements the full model, and most that borrow the terminology adapt it to their own structure — what matters in practice is the underlying idea: small, outcome-owning teams instead of hand-off chains.
How I apply this at Endress+Hauser
For around four years I have built and led a cross-functional squad of two business owners, UX, and IT working on the Products section of endress.com. The squad owns its outcomes end to end: from writing business requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria, through development, to running user acceptance testing myself before anything ships. We work in Scrum and Kanban, so priorities can move fast without losing the discipline of a defined backlog.
This structure is what made it possible to ship things like the AI-powered cross-selling engine, the PIM data migration, the relevance-based sorting model, and the market-level stock availability feature — each of those needed tight, continuous collaboration between business logic, data, UX, and engineering, which is exactly what a squad is built for.
Squad vs. Guild
Where a squad is a standing team with shared delivery responsibility, a guild is looser: a voluntary, cross-team community around a shared interest or discipline, without direct reporting lines or delivery ownership. Alongside my squad, I am also an active member of endress.com’s cross-squad Agile Guild — see what a guild is for how that works day to day, including the Squad Health Checks I lead.
This is also part of my day-to-day skill set as a Product Owner.