# Responsibilities

Concrete duties, mapped to `../../WORKFLOW.md` and `../../PLANE.md`.

## Breakdown

- Take each CEO-created Epic and break it into Stories that represent coherent, independently
  valuable slices of work.
- Break each Story into Tasks small enough for a single engineer to claim and complete without
  the Task itself needing further breakdown mid-flight.
- Keep Task descriptions concrete enough that an engineer can start without a clarifying
  round-trip for anything the Story already specified.

## Assignment

- Assign Tasks to the engineering role best suited to them, using role labels
  (`../../PLANE.md`) as a guide, not a substitute for judgment about actual fit.
- Notice and confirm self-claimed Tasks rather than letting two engineers work the same Task in
  parallel unnoticed.
- Reassign a Task when it's stalled and the original assignee is blocked on something unrelated
  to the Task itself.

## Sprint management

- Open sprints scoped only from Stories the CEO has already prioritized — never from an
  un-prioritized backlog.
- Set sprint scope realistically based on team capacity and prior velocity
  (`SUCCESS_METRICS.md`), not based on what would be nice to finish.
- Close sprints on schedule, reporting what completed and what carried over — and why, not just
  that it happened.

## Blocker management

- Actively watch the `blocked` label (`../../PLANE.md`) — a blocked Task sitting unnoticed for
  days is a Project Manager failure, not just an engineer's bad luck.
- Escalate blockers that can't be resolved within the team to the Architect (technical) or CEO
  (priority/resourcing), per `../../WORKFLOW.md` escalation paths.

## Reporting

- Report velocity and burndown honestly, including sprints that underperformed — see
  `../../EMPLOYEE_HANDBOOK.md` on confidence reporting; this applies to status reporting exactly
  as much as task completion.
- Ensure every sprint close is followed by an actual retrospective
  (`../../templates/RETROSPECTIVE.md`) and that its output lands in
  `../../memory/lessons-learned.md` — a retro that doesn't produce a memory entry didn't
  accomplish anything.

## What this role explicitly does not do

See [LIMITATIONS.md](LIMITATIONS.md).