See Agile Fluency by James Shore and Diana Larsen
One-Star Teams Create Business Value
- Benefit: Greater visibility into teams’ work; ability to redirect.
- Investment: Team development and work process design.
- Core Metric: Team regularly reports progress from a business value perspective.
- Transparency: Management knows when the team is building the wrong thing, or isn’t making progress, and has the ability to positively intervene.
- Alignment: The team works collaboratively, reducing misunderstanding and hand-off delays.
Two-Star Teams Deliver on the Market’s Cadence
- Benefit: Low defects and high productivity.
- Investment: Lowered productivity during technical skill development.
- Core Metric: Team ships on market cadence.
- Transparency: Fast concept-to-delivery cycle times reveal systemic flaws early.
- Alignment: High technical quality and frequent delivery results in high morale, and more productive work.
Three-Star Teams Optimize Their Value
- Benefit: Higher value deliveries and better product decisions.
- Investment: Social capital expended on incorporating business expertise into team.
- Core Metric: Team provides concrete business metrics.
- Transparency: The team reports its results using concrete business metrics, such as RoI, net profit per employee, and customer satisfaction.
- Alignment: Mutual trust between the team and its organization leads to rapid, effective negotiation, and the team’s broad-based expertise eliminates hand-offs and speeds decision making.
Four-Star Teams Contribute to Optimizing the System
- Benefit: Alignment with organizational goals; synergistic effects.
- Investment: Significant effort in establishing organizational culture; inventing new practices.
- Core Metric: Team reports how its actions impact the overall organization.
- Transparency: The team describes its work in the context of the business’s other initiatives, allowing products to be balanced against each other.
- Alignment: The team cross-pollinates perspectives, context, and innovations with other teams and other parts of the organization.