The High Performing Team

Describing a high performing software team can sometimes feel like writing a fairy tale. I’ve been lucky to have worked on 2 truly high performing teams. In this post we’ll take a look at the signs your team is operating at a high level.

For anyone who has ever depended on a software team, the experience of working with a strong team is vastly different from working with other teams. A few of the indicators we’ll look at are: reliable estimates; bugs are a surprise; users love the product; and the team is relaxed.

Reliable Estimates

When it comes to estimates a number of things begin to happen. The estimates that are provided are almost always accurate within a reasonable margin. When an estimate is off you’ll know it very early. This gives you time to adjust priorities or make decisions as desired. Eventually you find yourself not even requiring estimates from the team because you start moving towards just working on the most impactful things first and the speed at which things are accomplished eliminates a lot of decision making.

Bugs Are a Surprise

One of the most obvious, quantifiable, signs that a team is high performing is the bug count. High performing teams rarely release bugs. In fact, it can be surprising to discover that you’ve forgotten how to even report a bug. What a great problem to have!

Users Love the Product

A critical sign of performance is, of course, whether the product does what it needs to. But beyond that, your users will love the product. There are numerous factors that go into this from a team perspective but when users love the product then you know the team is building what they want. The team is responsive to requests and takes the time to truly understand their problems to ensure they’re building the right things.

Relaxed team

When thinking about high performing teams one might envision 100% activity at maximum efficiency all the time. The reality is quite different than that. The best teams understand the importance of slack and rest in order to continue a sustainable pace at high quality levels. As a result, these teams are far less stressed than most teams and working is actually enjoyable. You’ll notice the results not only in the software but also in employee retention and satisfaction scores.

Recognize these signs on your team? If you’re not sure then it’s likely your team is in the average range of the spectrum. If you do have a high performing team then congratulations! It’s far more rare than it should be and you’ve done a great job building the team whether it was intentional or a little lucky. Be careful not to upset the apple cart and let them do what they do best.

A word of caution here, don’t mistake having a few excellent developers with having a high performing team. It’s obviously nice to have them but being a high performing team takes more than just smart people.