Journey to High-Performing Team
When referring to building teams, we often mention Tuckman's stages of group development: forming–storming–norming–performing.
That helps understand the process.
In software engineering, we tend to name most of the teams as high-performing, without questioning what it means.
One way to assess the "high performance" of software delivery and engineering was described in Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations.
But today, I want to mention a model from the Elegant Puzzle - one of the cookbooks for engineering management.
Model mentions 4 stages of a team:
Falling behind - backlog is longer each week than it was the week before.
Treading water - team can get their critical work done but cannot pay down technical debt or begin new projects.
Repaying debt - team can start paying down tech debt and is beginning to benefit from it.
Innovating - technical debt is relatively low, morale is high, and most work is focused on satisfying user needs.
To read more, there’s an article by the author of the book - Will Larson: https://lethain.com/durably-excellent-teams/