Getting More from Your Team Health Checks

Overview
The article explains how Spotify conducts squad health checks to gain self-awareness and drive continuous improvement. It summarizes insights from a talk by Justin Kotzé and Fiona Siseman at the 2022 Spotify Engineering Conference.

Key Takeaways

• Health checks help teams identify systemic improvement areas beyond regular retrospectives.
• Regular cadence (at least 60% of squads) and a clear visualisation of results enable leadership to see trends.
• Effective debrief workshops turn survey results into concrete action items.
• Over 5,000 health checks have been run since 2014, demonstrating scalability of the practice.

Who Would Benefit

• Engineering managers and tech leads looking to implement or refine team health diagnostics.
• Agile coaches and Scrum Masters interested in data-driven improvement processes.
• Product owners and senior leaders seeking visibility into squad health trends.

Frameworks and Methodologies

• Squad Health Check Model (2014)
• Survey-based self-assessment
• Visualisation of aggregated results for multi-team analysis