High-performance athletic teams verses high-performance product teams

Healthy teams are focusing on practice and process and not outcomes and output

Measuring The Wrong Activities

In my time as a leader I’ve contributed to the pointless task of measuring team dynamics that probably shouldn’t be measured. I’ve created dashboards to measure hours, velocity, capacity, productivity, progress towards goals, pipeline, and even sentiment.

The problem is that these are rational measures in an irrational world.

Humans are inherently irrational. Several authors and researchers like Dan Ariely, BJ Fogg, and the late Daniel Kahneman have given us insights into why people are doing counterintuitive things every day. People choose behavior that just doesn’t make sense, but somehow it still works. People are delightfully unpredictable and often irrational.

If you’re measuring your team’s productivity with adoption, hourly tracking, tickets and code commits you already know it’s hard to tease out insights from this data. More doesn’t mean better. High adoption of the latest productivity platform has no direct link to value delivered to a customer. I admit that velocity that use it (e.g. cycle time) is a significantly better form of value to measure, but I think we can do better.

Just making more stuff is a terrible way to build useful products, and measuring how much we make doesn’t address the fundamental idea of what is valuable.

Many of the traditional metrics of productivity are unreliable and the time it takes to implement and administrate these measures can be a massive burden on the team and leaders. I’ve heard from some managers that almost half their time is spent gathering, measuring and reporting on these productivity metrics. Add in 1:1’s, admin obligations, and HR mandated work and the manager is now spending more time in measuring than in mentoring, guiding, problem solving and coaching.

Athletic teams are often used as a benchmark for product teams. If a high-performing NBA basketball team or Tour de France cycling team can do it, then why not a product team? I’m guilty of this too. I’ve used these comparisons in my talks. I’ve held up these sports examples to coach product teams and motivate my employees, but I’ve also added the caveat that sports teams are playing a finite game, while companies are essentially embarked on an infinite game. Or, at the very least, a game with no obvious end in sight.

The Characteristics of a High-Performing Team

I was fortunate enough to be part of one of the largest independent surveys on team maturity, the Design Maturity Assessment. Hundreds of companies in 70 countries completed the survey of 80+ questions. In our review of 2,700 survey results and follow up interviews we found that product design teams that display high maturity are engaging in hard to measure behavior.

These mature teams are focused on on building trust, developing authentic relationships between team members, frequently experimenting with new solutions, and are maintaining group health through non-measurable activities like unstructured conversations and flexible open-minded thinking.

Can we ever measure these things? Hopefully, but maybe they don’t need to be measured. After all, you don’t measure the most important relationships. You don’t have a NPS score for your children, partners and family members. You don’t do a family QBR or a capacity planning meeting with your children every quarter. Doing so would be a little sociopathic.

We can certainly see that trust, relationships and mentoring are common place in athletic teams, but what’s significant and essential to grasp is that athletic team measures are not the the same for product teams. Sports teams can measure a specific outcome, like a game score or a league win. Product teams are not “winning” anything. They are continuously delivering value to a customer and that’s a very different game.

We need to be aware of what we measure because it quickly railroads the conversation to that metric. As Goodhart’s Law tells us: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we set one specific goal, people will tend to optimize for that objective regardless of the consequences. This leads to problems when we neglect other equally important aspects of a situation.

Working Together Towards Pride and Accomplishment

What if we instead moved our attention to the process of working together. Process is definitely harder to measure but it has more value. This is where we see positive comparisons with sports teams and athletes. A basket baller with a disciplined practice will have a significantly higher chance of performing when the time comes than a player who wings it. Process is a practice. Practice is improvement.

As my friend and fellow product leader, Keith Hopper described, high performing athletes are not spending 100% of their time at peak. Most of their time is spent in low effort practice. Training, experimenting, often failing and always learning. These exceptional performers are obsessed with the practice, with the process because they know if they do that the results will take care of themselves.

Let’s break down the differences between high-performing athletic teams and product teams:

• In athletics, before you can start work on intensive efforts, you need to build a significant training base. In work, we expect teams to do intensive efforts with no base training.
• In sports, before a big game/event you meditate, calm yourself, and trust your training. In work, you rush into a packed schedule of meetings and putting out fires. Big efforts are frenetic, stressful, and intentionally depart from the meager training we recieve at work.
• In athletics, burnout or injury is a signal you’re pushing too hard and you need to rest and recover. In work, we treat illness or burnout as a weakness and shame people who experience it.
• In athletics, rest and recovery are as important, if not more, as the training. In work, rest and recovery are an afterthought and culturally dissuaded.
• In sports, a coach will spend time with athletes to review games, view recordings and reflect on what needs to change. In work, we have ‘retros’ which are a virtue signaling exercise for “look what I did” and have no opportunity for reflection and learning.
• In athletics, an exceptional performance is well paced, energetically economic, and repeatable. In work, exceptional performance is rare, motivated by fear, and almost never repeatable.
• In athletics, career-long high performers are humble, curious, and employ sustainable strategies. In work, career-long high performance is made near-to-impossible by unsustainable practices and toxic environments.

By focusing on process and not outcomes we can literally change the game. If we do that, we’ll need new ways to work. Maybe even working without rational measures. This might sound irrational, but that’s the point. As irrational, emotional, and fallible humans we need time to calm our nervous systems, reflect on our experiences and create spaces for safe conversations. People are not to be used up and thrown away like parts of an engine.

Let’s start measuring the right things.

Let’s measure process and practice.

Let’s measure our team health and our individual health and happiness.

Let’s measure our discipline and training.

These measures are like type 2 fun. Type 2 fun is something that’s not enjoyable while it’s happening, but is appreciated in retrospect. Like running a marathon or solving a difficult engineering problem. Type 2 fun is what all rewarding work looks like. It’s challenging but not dangerous, and uncomfortable but in a way that makes you feel alive. It leaves you with a sense of pride and accomplishment. Doesn’t that sound pretty amazing?