How to Measure Team Health

Product team health is a much talked about topic. Healthy teams make better products, and everyone wants better products no matter where you sit in the business. There are many tactics published by various orgs and thought leaders that address this, and many tools/apps/add-ons created to measure. Some interesting or useful ones are:

• Danny Carvajal from Contentsquare details techniques used by Spotify and how to further workshop them

• Product School has an explainer on various team metrics and how to gather them

• Andy Cleff, an Agile leader, provides links to many different apps and methodologies to use within your product team

• John Cutler of Amplitude advocates for a daily health check-in via a simple spreadsheet, and he’s also written a longer post about maturity and general health signals

There are no shortage of think-pieces and tools to use to bring the idea of a “health check” to your teams. You could discuss and debate the merits of each for months. But I decided to strip it all back a little bit when engaging on this topic with my product managers.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Prior to stand-up I mentioned we’d be discussing the topic of team health and provided some of the above resources, but not the exhaustive list. Then during stand-up, I asked them to do their own thinking, to develop their own measures.

By creating a simple line with “immature” at one end and “mature” at the other, and a second line of “unhealthy” and then “healthy”, we whiteboarded features and characteristics of teams to add to the spectrum. We generally agreed, and maybe shifted a couple sticky notes based on other entries, but the idea is to get quantity here. Each product manager might view their team or metrics differently, and that is okay - we aren’t going for homogeneity.

Then, I asked the question, “how do we get there?” meaning how do we get to a mature, healthy team. This time the spectrum definition was from “difficult to achieve” to “highly feasible”. Again, each product manager’s suggested action items for their teams were slightly different, but the purpose was to generate the idea.

Then I encouraged each of the product managers to take this back to their own teams and look for those specific team-generated definitions of maturity and health to work toward.

Top 10 / Bottom 10

Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale have a unique and insightful perspective on management - especially middle-management of distributed workforces. In their book Unmanageable: Leadership Lessons from an Impossible Year, they tackle many topics from the first year of the pandemic head-on. All of those lessons are still applicable, and impactful, today.

Out of the gate, they try to distill down who needs to know what. One great way to do that is by eliminating the 80% in the middle.

It goes like this: There are plenty of other places for your middle 80%. What we want in this room are the things that are going so well that we should celebrate and the things that are so wretched that you need help to get through them.

As a leader, this helps cut through some of the clutter, and as a contributor, this helps narrow your focus. If your team shares these, it helps everyone understand the context others are working in and where they might be able to help. It is a masterful tool to get to the areas that need the most attention.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Create a white-board chart where folks can fill in their top 10 / bottom 10. As you talk through the board, it can be helpful to start at the bottom. Try to find an action step for each of the items if possible, or find connections between folks or their sticking points that could help each other. Without dwelling too long on any one issue, make sure folks are heard. Then move to the top. Celebrate! Each entry should be something to acknowledge and recognize. Encourage folks to take this exercise to their product or working teams, as part of a retro or review.

Guiding Questions

John Cutler, the “Product Evangelist and Coach” at Amplitude and prolific tweeter, posted in March of 2021 about guiding questions. The instructions are simple - to as a team brainstorm guiding questions (not goals) that you refer to frequently.

The beauty of guiding questions is that they aren’t a prescription. Instead they offer a lens for you to think through some of your assumptions or actions. In contrast to guiding principles or even mission statements, they offer a bit more time for consideration or discussion.

This was John Cutler’s list:

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Have the group brainstorm a list of guiding questions that would be useful for their product team or general work. Vote or react to each other’s entries, and group similar ones together. Challenge the group to ask questions about themselves and the way they work as much as the outputs or external factors. Revisit this list regularly; use it to help onboard new team members.

Team Psychological Safety

Most folks are aware of our fight or flight response triggered by stress. But there are many more layers to our brain’s responses, which affect our daily interactions and our personal reactions. The Academy of Brain-based Leadership has a model called S.A.F.E.T.Y. that dives into your brain’s psychological safety needs. They describe:

The S.A.F.E.T.Y.™ Model describes six domains of threat or reward that are important to the brain. Understanding the needs, rewards, motivations, biases and stress triggers of each domain can provide valuable insights into yourself and others and help improve interactions, teamwork and productivity.

The six domains are Security, Autonomy, Fairness, Esteem, Trust and You.

Learning about your own triggers is almost as important as understanding all of them that exist. It can fundamentally change the way you interact with your team - how you ask questions, what language you use to present ideas, who you ask to work together, how you discuss setbacks or failures.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE
Ask your team to take the free assessment to learn their individual top domain. Have the group self-identify and tally how many of each domain exist in the team. Discuss if they were surprised by or validated by their results. (Several folks on my team said they were a bit embarrassed by their results, which was an interesting opener to a discussion.) Discuss how you might use this knowledge going forward to identify the unconscious biases driving decisions and behavior, or how this might change how they motivate or reward the team.

Note: My team uses Miro to drive engagement during discussions.

Find Your Allies

Often in a product structure, product managers are responsible for the outcomes of large projects or initiatives, but they lack formal jurisdiction. They must gain trust and respect within their cross-functional teams and across the organization, then use that to influence / persuade / cajole. One way to do this effectively is to find your allies.

WHAT?
Allies can come in many forms, and can be on the same organizational level as you or not. But what they provide is support through:
Backing - allies can be a consenting voice for your ideas or an extra vote in your favor. This could be verbally / visibly present, or could be a behind the scenes influence.
Assistance - allies can provide hands-on tactical help to meet a deadline or move you over a roadblock.
Advice / information - allies can provide a new way of thinking about a problem, or additional context you might not have had.
Networking - if they can’t give the help you need, allies can send you to their contacts who might be better equipped.
Protection - allies can be your eyes and ears in other venues, helping set the record straight or encouraging folks to see your side of a problem.
Friendship - allies can be the listening ear, helping smooth over losses and celebrate wins!

WHO?
Allies can and should be from across the organization - from leadership down to individual contributors. The more diverse your set of allies, the more effective your network.
Build your strong personal support base from:

• product team(s)

• other product owners in the product management practice area

• similar roles across across the organization (analysts, site managers, etc.)

• gateway people (coordinators, exec assistants)

• interest groups / practice areas (Community of Practice, steering council, equity teams)

Allies can be, but should not just be:

• mentor

• coach

• stakeholders

HOW?
Building a team of allies is a reciprocal exercise. You can make it a verbalized reciprocal agreement with someone, or you can simply begin supporting folks and thank them when they return the favor.
You can support your ally by:

• giving recognition / credit

• assistance with regular tasks

• giving attention / moral support

• networking them with other contacts

• alerting them to trends / patterns

• providing resources

• championing them

Note: In this context we are discussing professional allies, but equally or even more important are allies within the DEI space. There is much overlap in behavior, but the need for and imperative to be supportive in the face of bias, micro-aggressions, or harassment is much greater. Read this information from HBR to learn more.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE
Discuss with your team what types of folks in your organization are good allies to the product practice area. Ask the team where they’ve found the most effective allies, and how they work to maintain those ties in their day to day.