Agreeing as a team
Pedro Gomes
SaaS Product Manager I SaaS Product Owner, ICP - PDM I Management 3.0 I PM3 I Lean Inception I IA enthusiast I Miro
Agreements are a core aspect of our lives, we have them everywhere, they deeply help us to coordinate and have a better coexistence with those around us. In the work environment they can align how our team will work, our values and what we can expect from each other. I’ve used Management’s 3.0 Team Agreement Canvas and it gave excellent results!
The Team Agreement Canvas is a guideline to creating agreements with our teams. The idea is to co-create the set of restrictions and rules your team will follow while working together, giving us clear guidelines to follow. It gives us 10 fields to consider, and we can create even more fields if needed.
My team had some agreements already, but we lacked a more visual and structured approach to it, they were a set of “lost” post-its within our Miro board. When I saw the new template, I knew I had to use it with my team, both to give a proper structure to our agreements and to review them at the same time.
I believe it was during a retrospective, at the end of it, I explained the idea to my team, and they went onboard with it, I copied the template, we started with our team’s name and purpose (ended up doing an Identity Symbol) then, we followed the numerical sequence. It was amazing seeing the discussions and how the aligned ended up being natural once we were discussing those points directly. For the Core Values, we ended up having to vote to elect the 5 core values we, as a team, could agree on. After about 40 minutes we had our new agreements, and everyone was happy with them!
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As time went on, I could see my team abiding by our agreements and internalizing them as a part of our daily routines, it was far more effective this time compared to our first try at creating team agreements, it believe it has to do with a more structured approach with a clear visual template that was easier to explain than before. They also saw the value behind the idea of team agreements, it always is important to do things your team sees the value of, otherwise the chances of it not working are high. As my CTO and I are restructuring the operations team, it is about time to create our team agreement’s using this same template, it is a smaller team, let’s see how it goes!