Signs of a High Performing Team

The purpose of the Scrum Master is to improve the adoption of Scrum. So, it makes sense that the Scrum Master should ask the question: What does a high-performing Scrum team look like? After all, how can you know what you're shooting for if you don't know what "great" looks like?

Here are 4 things that high-performing teams do:

1) Customer Outcomes are Improving - The most important sign of a high performing team is that customer outcomes are improving because of the work product that is delivered by the Scrum team. After all, that is why we are working together as a team - to deliver value to the customer.  High performing teams measure customer outcomes and adapt the product based on market and customer feedback.

2) Use the Retrospective to improve - Scrum is built on Empiricism. At its heart is the idea of Transparency—so we can honestly inspect and adapt our process and product.

High-performing teams are always improving the product and the way they work together. That’s critical because Scrum is used in complex environments that require creativity and problem solving. We can’t just write a set of instructions and follow them to deliver the product.  Instead, the team is accountable for their own work process, and they are always improving it.

3) High morale – People want to do good work, and when a Scrum team is high performing, they usually know it. Morale is high because the team sees steady progress, delivers value, and works well together. That sense of momentum and purpose creates a positive feedback loop—when people feel their work matters, they’re more engaged, and when they’re more engaged, they do better work. You can often feel it in the room: there's energy, openness, and pride in what the team is building together.

4) Deliver value every Sprint - Every Sprint, a high-performing team delivers a done, usable increment. That means they deliver something that works and is potentially releasable.

Does that mean they must release to production every Sprint? No. The Product Owner decides when to release. If I said the Scrum Team had to release to production every Sprint, that would take power away from the Product Owner. But the team should deliver something that is potentially releasable.

Why does it matter? Because working toward a potentially releasable increment every Sprint reduces risk by uncovering issues earlier, even if the Product Owner doesn't decide to release it right away.

For example, I worked with a team that was re-platforming a major consumer website. In the first Sprint, they delivered a simple page with just the brand's logo on the new platform. Because they released it to the Test environment, they uncovered code environment issues they wouldn’t have found if they had kept everything in Development.

Stakeholders were also thrilled to see how quickly the team could use the new platform—even though this wasn’t something the Product Owner was at all likely to release to production. Not to mention, we found out early that we were using an outdated version of the logo. That seems important.

Conclusion

There is a thread of continuity across all of these. These are all possible because of two key concepts: Incremental delivery and Empiricism. Incremental delivery means we deliver work in smaller, usable pieces. It is incremental delivery that enables us to use Empiricism which means that we embrace transparency so that we can inspect and adapt our work, our processes, and improve the product that is being delivered based on feedback received from the market. These aren't just fancy words, they are at the heart of what makes Scrum work.

Rebel Scrum is the host of the annual Scrum Day Madison Agile conference. And did we mention that this year, one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto will be joining us?