What makes teams high performance? by Ron Lichty

This year's survey into what makes teams high performance needs you.

Take part. There’s an Apple gift card to be won. And more important to many of you, we’ll share the results with you when the survey is complete and they’ve been tabulated and cross-correlated!

This is the Global Study of Product Team Performance.

Results have been worth having. Take a look at my brief overviews of the past four surveys - it’s all free.
  
The insights have been intriguing and sometimes truly incisive.

For example, what if you were able to identify just five things that:
    ▪    if you do all of them, you have a 67% likelihood of high level team performance
    ▪    if you don't do them, you have just a 2% chance of high level team performance
The 2012 Study of Product Team Performance identified just that.

It’s only gotten more insightful with subsequent studies. What is it about positive work environments, nimbleness, user experience? The importance of executive engagement and product manager role definition. The impact of effective onboarding and effective standups. As a coauthor of the Study, I’m no doubt biased. But it’s why I became a coauthor of the Study.

The findings are free to all, each year. Take the survey and we’ll tell you where to get the Study as soon as results are available. As in prior years, there are a bunch of sponsors - partner companies and industry associations - helping us get broad participation and defraying the costs.

We would love hear your thoughts on these subjects. You can add your voice to hundreds of others by clicking on this link.

One of the reasons the study is so useful is that it can help get senior execs on board. One of the hard truths is that sometimes it takes studies (and consultants and other kinds of backup!) to sway disbelief. The need for outside support - for reinforcements - is what motivated my co-author and me to share 300 Rules of Thumb for managing software people and teams in the quickly thumb-able center section of our book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (Addison Wesley). And it’s why studies like this one, the Study of Product Team Performance, are so important.

As always, we need your participation. (And you might win a $200 Apple gift card, courtesy of the study’s sponsors, Planbox, Accelerance and Project Connections! Just enter your contact information at the end of the survey to enroll in the random drawing.)

We particularly need developers, testers and UX practitioners. The product managers and project managers have, to date, overwhelmed our numbers.

The survey takes seven minutes to fill out and it’s crisp, even on your phone.

You’ll get first notice of this year’s findings by taking the survey right now.

We want to hear from you!