On April 21, 2017, I presented a workshop at Ground Control entitled Teams Are Products Too.

Presentation summary:
Just like products and services, teams require continuous improvement and refinement with the aim of ‘working better than before’. This workshop covered:

• Adapting and applying the syntax of user stories within teams to create more effective, more meaningful communication with team members and clients.
• As with product product prototypes, consider how easy it could be to prototype a new way of working when the old one isn’t doing the job – build a useful solution, test it’s ability to actually solve a team problem and implement it successfully.
• Your team is your user, so with user-based testing establish the baselines for the important metrics you’re looking to measure against. Taking steps to improve Team morale? Well how are you measuring that, when and why? Aiming for better quality code? Then work out what ‘better’ and ‘quality’ mean and how you’ll know you’ve got there – i.e. your definition of done.
• Customer feedback is best when considered and acted on frequently to prevent customers having to put up with less than great experiences; with teams as customers, gain regular feedback to be able to iterate on your process and make improvements as soon as you can, rather than waiting, especially better than waiting until the end of the project.

Project success relies on team success. Implementing a process of continuous feedback, refinement and problem solving is critical to team success and happiness. These techniques power up teams by engaging the team from problem solving through to testing and implementing solutions for long lasting improvement.