Team Health Check

Leadership dashboards measure what's easy to count. A health check asks the team how things actually feel, and turns the answers into something it can fix.

Overview

A team health check is a short self-assessment built on Spotify’s squad health check model. Each card names one dimension: fun, ease of release, health of the codebase, delivering value, speed, learning, mission, support. Each comes with an “awesome” description and a “crappy” one. The team votes green, yellow, or red on each, and also on whether that dimension is getting better or worse. Then it talks about the reds and picks one to work on. The whole thing fits in under an hour.

We run it as a reflection format, once or twice in a six-week dojo challenge, sometimes scoped to the last iteration only. Treat the results as the team’s own data. The moment a manager compares teams by their number of greens, the votes lose their context and power. That’s Goodhart’s Law in action. What matters is the trend over time and the conversation the reds start. On a team with low psychological safety, every card comes back green. That tells you something too.

Resources

• Henrik Kniberg and Kristian Lindwall, “Squad Health Check Model: Visualizing What to Improve” (Spotify Engineering, 2014)
• Retrospectives — the broader practice a health check feeds
• Dojo Loop: Reflect — where we use it in a dojo challenge
• Developer Experience — the organization-scale measure of many of the same dimensions