WoB#2 - Team health checks, delivery metrics, PRDs, North Star metrics, Moonshots
Welcome to this week's edition of Whisky on the Blocks, highlighting the latest updates to the Blocks Catalog and the best findings for the week.
👋 Hey! My name is Piotr, and welcome to my newsletter on building blocks for successful tech product companies. Subscribe for free step-by-step guides on best practices used by the best companies every second week!
💬 In this week's issue:
Block Spotlight: Team health checks
Product delivery performance metrics
Product Requirement Docs (PRD)
Company North Star Metric
Big Tech projects and the curious absence of scrum
The power of thinking big and what household names came from it
Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
Tweet of the week
Smile of the week
🔍 Block spotlight: Run Team health checks
Team health checks are a self-assessment workshop technique for teams looking to improve how they work together to achieve better results.
Some useful links on the subject:
Squad Health Check model – visualizing what to improve
by Henrik Kniberg
Great piece on how Spotify uses health checks for teams to self-assess for things they care about, like: how difficult it is to release, how healthy the codebase is, and happy they are with the value they’re bringing.
Squad Health Check Miro template
by Malcom Bastien
Great Miro board template to help you run health checks in your team.
Blocks to inspire
A few other best practices used by successful companies that you can find on the Blocks Catalog:
🟪 Engineering
Measure delivery performance metrics
🟥 Product 🟦 Design
Use Product Requirement Docs (PRD)
🟧️️ Leadership
Find Company North Star Metric
👌 Other good reads
How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
by Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer)
Great piece on the best practices for managing projects in the tech industry. Inside an overview of a survey with over 100 companies represented, including Big Tech, and the curious lack of Scrum at Big Tech.
10x Not 10% - Product management by orders of magnitude
by Ken Norton (Bring The Donuts)
Fantastic post about how to apply moonshot thinking, examples of companies that owe their successes to thinking big, and examples of companies that collapsed because they couldn’t.
Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
by Jakob Nielsen (Nielsen Norman Group)
This is a good case of how long, fancy usability tests are a total waste of time and money and why you should stick to testing a small group of 5 people and do as many mini-tests as possible to get the best results.
🐦 Tweet of the week
😄 Weekly smile
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Good luck, have fun and see you in a bit!
Piotr 👋
Nice Zieta