The Software Team Spectrum

Through the course of my career I’ve worked on or with numerous software teams and something I’ve observed is how the quality of the teams differ. Teams tend to fall within three distinct categories: Low performing, Average, and High performing. There are, of course, variations within the categories but for the most part a team falls into one of these categories with a typical bell curve distribution. That is, there are relatively few low performing teams, most teams are average, and few high performing teams.

This is all fairly intuitive. What isn’t so intuitive is just how big the difference is when it comes to business outcomes. Putting the difficulties of measuring software team effectiveness aside, there is at least an order of magnitude difference between each of the categories. An average software team will perform at least 10 times more effectively than a low performing software team and a high performing team will, likewise, outperform an average team by at least 10 times.

Often when I’ve joined a team and gotten to know them well enough to identify them as an average team I’ll mention to a team lead or project manager that I think the team can be 10 times better. This is usually met with a smirk as though I’m joking around or exaggerating. Thing is, I know it’s possible because I’ve had the good fortune of working on 2 high performing teams.

Why is it so surprising to folks that their team can produce an order of magnitude better results than they’re currently doing? It comes down to experience. If you take an average developer’s career after 6 years and assume they’ve been on 3 different teams in that time, the chances they’ve been on a high performing team are very low. At this point they’re starting to take on more leadership roles and teaching younger developers the things they know. Not having ever witnessed a high performing team they can only introduce average level skills. They don’t know what they don’t know. In fact, if they had happened upon a low performing team along the way, they’ll believe what they’re doing is fantastic because, in comparison, it truly is.

How can you tell where your team is on the spectrum? In future posts we’ll explore what each of these levels looks like and how you can identify where your team is at.