Introduced and published initially in the Spotify tech blog, the squad health check allows a company working with teams of developers (squads, feature teams, …) to measure how the team works fine based on several criteria. This meeting aims to describe the interest in this exercise, what these questions are, and some rules to follow to maximize its interest and impact.

❯  How do I perform this health check?

This exercise aims to allow a team to express how they feel about their team and how they work from their point of view. It is also a good moment for them to share their vision with others and raise the real dysfunctions they don’t usually have the opportunity to discuss.

Setting up an environment of freedom and free speech is crucial to make this exercise enjoyable and motivate people to express themselves freely. To achieve this, here are a few rules to apply:

• Animate the meeting with someone outside of the team who is also sensitized to the exercise: a Product Manager ( PM) or an Engineering Manager (EM) from another team are excellent candidates to perform this exercise. In case where several teams are competing to do this exercise, you can think about a rotation of EM/PM: you do the training for another team, and in exchange, your colleague can do the same for your team! 🙂

• Take notes without quoting names. Note examples given by the participants and the different opinions if team members are not aligned. For the sake of transparency, make these notes public with the team, ideally during the meeting, and share these notes with them after the meeting

• Keep the history of these notes and the statuses / trends for the questions I will describe afterward to measure how these points evolve over time and whether the actions taken have impacted them.

• In debriefing with the people responsible for the team you audited, pay particular attention to sharing with them the team’s opinion on these different questions as accurately as possible. Then, discuss potential actions to improve their team’s well-being and functioning with them.

• In this exercise, repetition is key. This is not a one-shot but something that has to be regularly reiterated. Thus, you have to decide a suitable recurrence for this exercise, and pay particular attention to respect this planning. Doing this every quarter seems to be a good tradeoff: not too often to allow decisions to enhance some aspects. Team fatigue is setting in, but in the meantime, it is often enough to regularly reevaluate how the team is working fine in remembering what we have said at the previous evaluation.

❯  Criteria of evaluation

❯  Statuses

During the workshop, the team will evaluate, with the support of a facilitator, different topics and check the following:

🟢 If this topic is ok: it doesn’t imply that there is nothing to do to improve this topic, but the team is considering that the current state of this topic is satisfying;

🟡 If this topic in not ok, but it doesn’t directly impact the team’s work, improvements on this topic should be applied, but this is not a top priority;

🔴 If this topic is critically not working: it implies that it is a high-priority topic that requires the team to be well-working, and then it has to be quickly addressed.

Doing this will allow the manager to determine which topic they should focus their efforts on.

❯  Trends

We will also ask how these different topics evolved since the last workshop (or, by default, during the last three months):

⬆️ The situation is better compared to the previous health check: it doesn’t necessarily imply that the topic is ok, but the team remarks that there are good signals underlying an overall improvement of the situation;

➡️ The situation is stable compared to the previous health check;

⬇️ The situation on this topic has decreased overall. Similarly to the first item, it doesn’t directly imply that the topic is not okay or critical but that the team considers it worse than the previous iteration.

Doing this will allow the manager to determine the effect of his action after the last health check recurrence; it is also helpful to detect new pain points that appeared since the last workshop.

❯  Topics to address and evaluate

During the workshop, the facilitator questions the team on the status, and the evolution of the trend since the previous workshop on 10 topics that are the following:

❯  📦 Easy to release 📦

• Examples

🟢 Releasing is simple, safe, painless & primarily automated.

🔴 Releasing is risky, painful, lots of manual work, and takes forever.

❯  👷 Suitable process 👷

• Examples

🟢 Our way of working fits us perfectly.

🔴 Our way of working sucks.

❯  👍 Tech quality (code base health) 👍

• Examples

🟢 We’re proud of the quality of our code! It is clean, easy to read, and has excellent test coverage.

🔴 Our code is a pile of dung, and technical debt is raging out of control.

❯  💍 Value 💍

• Examples

🟢 We deliver great stuff! We’re proud of it, and our stakeholders are really happy.

🔴 We deliver crap. We feel ashamed to deliver it. Our stakeholders hate us.

❯  🏎️ Speed 🏎

• Examples

🟢 We get stuff done quickly. No waiting, no delays.

🔴 We never seem to get done with anything. We keep getting stuck or interrupted. Stories keep getting stuck on dependencies.

❯  🚀 Mission 🚀

• Examples

🟢 We know precisely why we are here and are excited about it.

🔴 We have no idea why we are here; there is no high-level picture or focus. Our so-called mission is entirely unclear and uninspiring.

❯  🥳 Fun 🥳

• Examples

🟢 We love going to work and have great fun working together.

🔴 Boooooooring.

❯  📚 Learning 📚

• Examples

🟢 We’re learning lots of interesting stuff all the time!

🔴 We never have time to learn anything.

❯  🤝 Support 🤝

• Examples

🟢 We always get great support & help when we ask for it!

🔴 We keep getting stuck because we can’t get the support & help that we ask for.

❯  ♟️Pawns or players ♟️️

• Examples

🟢 We are in control of our destiny! We decide what to build and how to build it.

🔴 We are just pawns in a chess game with no influence over what we build or how we build it.

❯  In conclusion: rules to respect to make it efficient

In addition to the team’s retrospectives, usually performed at each end of the iteration, the team manager can gather feedback and think about actions to improve their team’s efficiency in the long run. There are a few rules to apply and respect to make it efficient.

→ All the team members should be involved in the exercise. Find the most suitable moment to perform the health check, and book enough time (from 30 minutes for the smaller team to 2 hours, eventually split into several chunks, which seems appropriate). More than getting the data expected for the health check, it is also an excellent opportunity to harvest insightful additional comments, potential levers, or ideas that could be activated to improve the situation and, in the meantime, improve the team’s involvement in these processes.

→ Also, choose someone without a conflict of interest to perform the exercise—not a direct manager (or one of the manager’s managers), not the team’s PM, etc. The reason is pretty simple: allow the team to talk freely, without the pressure of management, without the fear of hurting a direct coworker. Someone managing another team or a product manager extern of the team are, for instance, excellent candidates to facilitate the workshop.

→ Regularly perform this exercise. Although it can be interesting to do this exercise on an isolated basis (for instance, after a conflict occurs in the team or after a wave of people leaving the company), this exercise is effective if performed repeatedly. Doing this regularly allows the team and its manager to evaluate how things are evolving over time (and check the effect of the actions taken to enhance the issue spotted during the previous workshop). I recommend performing this exercise roughly every three months (for instance, at the end of the quarter) to keep it efficient.

→ Finally, decide the action to work on until the next session. The health check session allows you to gather feedback. This feedback allows you to think about actions to enhance the negative points raised by the team. This is how to improve the team’s performance and the well-being of its individuals.