A Star Team is an awesome team that is extremely effective in fulfilling its purpose. But what skills does a Star Team have? How do you take your team closer to a Star Team, a step closer to awesome? Let us dive into the universe of Star Team Skills.

There has been a lot of research on how to define team performance and how to build high performance teams. Many people (managers?) still try to simplify team performance into one single measure, in some cases even using measures leading to unwanted behaviours of the team. But then the first question is: What is team performance? Is it number of produced lines of code (nope!), is it the sprint velocity (better but no!) or is it team happiness (getting closer)? The world is not as simple as that.

There is not one single measure for Team Performance!

Let us instead split the common perception of "team performance" into Star Team Skills. A Team Skill is a skill that helps a team get closer to awesome (extremely effectively fulfilling its purpose), that can be learned and that can measure an aspect of the team value in the long run. The word performance will not be discussed further in this article since it is a too simple view of a team. 

A team needs five skills to become a Star Team.​

There is not one single skill that defines a Star Team, but five (5)! The five Star Team Skills are Speed, Outcome, Collaboration, Happiness and Innovation.

Speed

When talking about a Star Team or awesome team, people usually think about team speed. This is truly a skill of a team and it defines how fast the team produces results. The speed is mainly about how concentrated the team can work on their tasks, how frequently they can deliver and in general how efficient the team works. Since the speed of a team dictates the value of the team very clearly, it is one of the first factors people look at. A low speed of a team very quickly leads to questions and pressure from stakeholders and may make the star team fall quickly. The speed does not describe the value of the outputs though.

Outcome

The outcome of a team describes the value of the output, how valuable the produced feature is to the user. In an ideal world this could be tightly related to revenues of the company, but since revenues are influenced by many other factors, this should rather be defined through value adding or value detracting aspects like quality, feature adoption or customer satisfaction. The outcome of a team changes over time and depends on how the team works.

Collaboration

How well the team works together tells directly how awesome the team can be. When the team members know each other well, communicate clearly and coordinates work well within the team, the team can be much more successful. The cohesion of the team and mutual understanding of each others personalities makes the team more awesome. 

Happiness

The psychological safety in the team is fundamental to an awesome team. Mutual trust is the basic component for getting in to conflicts and committing to agreements. ​One single unhappy person can change the entire team moral, just as one very happy person also can. People feel happy when they can take pride in what they do and feel they make progress. And finally the core: happy people do a better job!

Innovation

People like to find better ways of working, to find new solutions and yes, to create a better world. This is an inner need of mankind and actually not only companies but also its people take pride in making progress. Learning new stuff and experimenting are also fundamental steps in making a team and its results awesome in the long run. Staying where you are leaves you behind and many corporates have encountered being left behind through lack of an innovation culture.

That makes SOCHI... I wish I could have found a great acronym for these skills but SOCHI doesn't really sound that cool, just think of the Star Team Skills instead (or even better, help me find an acronym)...

But, aren't these skills all connected?

Yes, while reading this you might have noticed that there are interdependencies among the Star Team Skills. And there is more you should know about the Star Team Skills.

• The Skills are interdependent!
  • They are not orthogonal dimensions, e.g. improving Innovation can lead to higher Speed.
  • It would have been great to have independent dimensions to measure team skills, but that is simply not how our complex world works.
• The skills of a team change over time!
  • Business and technology landscape evolves, people mature, ​even a tough project deadline can influence the skills…​
• You can balance and grow the skills!
• Actually, you MUST balance and grow the skills!

Isn't there something missing in the Star Team Skills?

Yes. Remember, our definition of a Star Team was a team extremely effective fulfilling its purpose. So, where is the purpose? The purpose is what drives the team to do what it does. But if the purpose doesn’t exist or is being weakened, the missing purpose will eat you up from inside.​ Without a purpose, no skills will ever help. I wont dive deeper into that here, but if you didn’t already, you should read the book called “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek!​

So, is this a framework for measurement, for improvements or just for fun?

This is where the fun starts... This framework was primarily meant to structure the skills a Star Team needs and in particular to structure best practices or tools to help a team improve these skills. This is how it is done in playboox. Playboox provides a webapp that helps you find ways of working (tools) to improve the Star Team Skills and allows you to filter the numerous tools by the Skills you want to improve.  If you want to know more about the value of tools, take a look here.

You should measure what you value, because you get what you measure! 

Thats why we want to know what we measure and don't simplify life to one single metric for the definition of a Star Team.

In an upcoming blog article we will discuss how to actually measure the Star Team Skills and how to improve upon them. Stay tuned and check in on our blog to learn more about the Star Team Skills!

But... I want to learn more right now... Thats great! Then you should start reading everything Nicole Forsgren, PHD, has written about measurement of developer performance and DevOps practices and tools. It will not correspond exactly to the Star Team Skills or playboox but certainly has a tremendous value! Enjoy!