What is a Team Health Check?

A Team Health Check is a comprehensive self-assessment tool for agile product teams to measure and track how well they are working together over time, providing deeper insights into specific areas they can improve. By stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, Team Health Checks gives leadership a broader perspective on the team, helps uncover systemic issues, helps measure team maturity, and promotes a culture of transparency and continuous improvement. On top of that, Team Health checks are just really engaging and a lot of fun.

The Team Health Check model, also known as the Spotify Squad Health Check, was first developed by Henrik Kniberg and Kristian Lindwall at Spotify.

How it works

Unliked regular sprint retrospectives, the Team Health Check model walks the team through a predefined set of thought-provoking questions across a variety of topics ranging from the health of the codebase, team morale, or even just how much fun they’re having.

Question by question, each team member is asked to reflect on a specific aspect of the team and provide their own personal opinion on whether they think the team is doing good, just ok, or poorly in that area. Participants are usually asked to reveal their answers all at once in order to reduce groupthink and bias.

Once everyone’s answer is revealed, the host should facilitate a discussion about that question. The host should make sure that every voice is heard. Once the discussion is complete, the host captures a single answer that represents how the team feels as a whole about that topic - bad, just ok, or good.

Benefits of Team Health Checks

• Comprehensive Insights: Because Health Checks force the entire team to reflect on a wide-range of topics, you end up uncovering a large number of actionable and potentially surprising learnings.

• Identify Systemic Issues: Health Checks help uncover system issues that simply will never come up during regular sprint retros.

• Support for leadership, managers, and coaches: Engineering managers, agile coaches, leadership, and team leads can use the learnings to know exactly where to focus their attention and allocate resources to create a more high-performing agile team.

• Fun and engaging: Relative to other types of retros, teams tend to find this model to be quite fun, engaging, and effective.

Team Health Check vs Sprint Retrospectives

Sprint Retrospectives are complementary to Team Health Checks. Sprint Retros help teams reflect on the most recent sprint and helps unblock the team from any immediate roadblocks. Unlike the Sprint Retrospective, the Team Health Check focuses on a much broader perspective and gives the team a more comprehensive look at overall team dynamics, collaboration, and work environment. The Sprint Retro is a magnifying glass and the Team Health Check is a wide-angle lens.

Who is the Team Health Check model for?

• The team: Team Health Checks are a powerful tool to help teams built up some self-awareness and align on what’s working and what’s not. It’s easy for an individual team member to believe it’s only them experiencing a problem, Team Health Checks help bring those issues to the surface. Not only will the team begin to understand what’s not working but they’ll get to celebrate and align on what they’re doing right.

• Anyone who supports the team: Team Health Checks provide engineering managers, agile coaches, scrum masters, and other team leaders with a high-level overview of what’s working and what isn’t. This high-level overview can be used to see patterns across different teams within the organization. The Team Health Check gives team leaders insights that can be used to effective address team challenges and improve upon what’s already working well.

Team Health Check Questions

The traditional Spotify Squad Health Check model guides agile development teams through 10 questions

• Easy to release: Assesses the simplicity and efficiency of the team’s release process. This includes automation, deployment, and speed.

• Suitable process: Assesses how well the team works and collaborates together

• Tech quality: Evaluates the health of the codebase. This includes things like cleanliness, readability, maintainability, and scalability.

• Value: This asks the team to reflect on whether or not the work they are doing is valuable to customers and stakeholders

• Speed: Evaluates the team’s ability to deliver work quickly and on-time. This would include discussions around any bottlenecks or ongoing delays.

• Mission: Assesses the team’s understanding and belief in the big-picture purpose and goals. Are they inspired by the mission?

• Fun: Evaluates how much fun the team has while working together.

• Learning: Assesses how much opportunity team members have to keep learning and growing. This focuses on knowledge sharing and personal and professional growth opportunities.

• Support: Evaluates whether or not the team feels like they get the support they need when they need it.

• Pawns or players: Assesses how satisfied the team is with their level of autonomy and involvement in the decision-making processes.

How to get the most out of your Team Health Check

• Encourage honest reflection: it’s on you as the host to set the scene and create an environment of open and honest dialogue. Emphasize that this retro is a moment to be heard, not judged.

• Make sure every voice is heard: When team members have revealed their votes, the host should go around the room and give everyone an opportunity to talk about why they voted the way they did. We suggest starting with the outliers - if someone voted green while everyone else voted red, start with that person.

• Focus on action items: More than anything else, the team and the host should be looking for action-items throughout the retrospective. Actions should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

• Have a debrief: As an optional step, the team’s leaders should consider having a meeting to discuss the results of the team health check and prioritize action items.

How to run a Health Check with RetroWave

RetroWave is an online tool for conducting squad health checks with remote and in-person agile teams. Sign up and run your first Health Check completely for free.

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