What exactly is a team charter?

Framing some thoughts on the various ways I've seen team charters reasoned about, and my thoughts / practices as well. This will turn into an eventual blog post, so I'm kinda crafting it in public this way.

• What is the purpose of a team charter?
• How does it impact the business?
• Is it worth establishing a charter for your team(s)?

Rough Notes

Charters are a tool for directionally influencing business impact. Why does an organization go through the churn of establishing a charter? The charter organizes the team around a clear mission, so it knows how it must design, develop, and ship value to its customers.

Establishing roles and responsibilities on the team. An engineering ladder may set the expectations for someone who is performing a certain job at a specific level, but each team has additional roles and responsibilities that may not be governed solely by the ladder. Example: in many companies, staff engineers are seen as team leads, helping to manage the overall technical work across the team. In reality, not every team needs their staff engineer to do that work - they may instead be the engineer focusing on having the deepest technical knowledge on complex subsystems. The charter can be used to establish which team members are responsible for which tasks/areas of ownership, regardless of title. It can also help the team to clear up areas where there overlapping concerns, like an engineering lead and a product manager managing different aspects of the team backlog.

---to be continued---