The specificity of project team formation is determined by the development of project management concepts, changes in society and in production. Management processes that are related to the human factor are a constant subject of interest for scientists. For effective management of IT projects, qualified people with certain competencies are needed, who create the core of the team in order to fulfill the assigned tasks. The future of the project will depend on how efficiently and "correctly" the team will be formed. The work offers the author's vision of the team formation procedure based on competence, psychological and quantitative criteria, taking into account the features of IT projects with a high degree of innovation, which require flexible management tools and self-managed, self-organizing teams. The task of forming a minimally viable IT project team is proposed to be solved by expanding the range of competencies of each member of the project team under the condition of minimizing its quantitative composition. The minimum complete team model of Raymond M. Belbin (idea generator, critic, and executor) was adopted as the basis for the formation of the IT project team. The application of a creative approach to the management of innovative IT projects, namely the design thinking technique, requires the allocation of an additional role - an empath. The generalized method of forming an IT project team with a high degree of innovation, which will use design thinking technology as a leading technology for software product development, is presented in the form of an algorithm.