Spotify Health Check Retrospective: Overview, Tips & Access

In the context of agile working methods, many companies like to take a look at Spotify and turn their teams into squads, tribes and chapters. Even more widespread than the organizational model, however, is the “Spotify Squad Health Check” model, which is very popular with agile teams, especially in connection with Scrum retrospectives. Find out why the Spotify Health Model is a good idea and how it can be used online in team retrospectives with the support of the right tooling.

What Is the Spotify Health Check Model?

The Spotify Health Check is a model that creates easy visibility of the metaphorical state of health of your team or squad. For this purpose, the Health Check uses statements (or “items”) from different categories, which are evaluated by all team members according to a simple traffic light scale. Find a deeper insight into the Spotify Health Check model here .

How do I perform a Spotify Health Check?

The Spotify Health Check model stimulates reflection in the team through its statements and the easily understandable evaluation. This stimulation of self-reflection can turn into a great (Scrum) retrospective .

As an example, the Spotify Health Check can be used in team retrospectives as follows:

1. In advance of the retrospective, the team is asked to answer a short survey on the items of the Spotify Health Check.
2. In the retrospective, you then look at the collected results of the Spotify Health Check together.
3. Based on the results, the team prioritizes which metrics of the Spotify Health Check would be most important for improvement and derives action items.
4. If you repeat this Spotify Health Check retrospective after some time, you can compare the new results with the old results in order to have a direct comparison and to make the development transparent.

By the way, before we go any further: If you prefer to consume this content in the form of a video, take a look at our video with an overview and 6 tips on the Spotify Health Check:

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The great advantages of using the Spotify Team Health Check model are: 

• The team is encouraged to reflect on a number of important aspects of the collaboration. Many team members find it easier to formulate their feedback through the specific items and to share their perspective in the retrospective.
• The team development is also traceable over a longer period of time thanks to the uniform metrics of the model.
• Once set up, the Team Health Check can help teams to conduct retrospectives more independently and more effectively.

In order for the introduction of the Spotify Health Check to work in retrospectives, good moderation is required, especially in the first iterations. More on this in the next section.

Tips for Facilitating the Spotify Health Check in Your Retrospective

When you use the Spotify Health Check Model for the first time in a retrospective, the model is probably new to many team members. To ensure that all team members quickly become familiar with the format, it is helpful to prepare some food for thought for the moderation in the retrospective. Here are some ideas for moderating the Spotify Health Check in the retrospective:

First of all: “Item” refers to the statement that is used to evaluate the category. This item is then rated on a scale (e.g. traffic light scale or 7-point scale):

The “moderation tips” then serve as food for thought in the retrospective.

We have divided the Spotify Health Check items here into the four areas:

• team
• organization
• Delivery
• Technology

In this way, you can focus better on individual areas in the retrospectives and have more time per topic. Of course, you can also reflect on several areas within a retrospective. In this case, however, you should allow at least 90 minutes.

Our recommendation: Do the 4 retrospectives for Spotify Health Check individually in Echometer. You will then automatically receive the overall evaluation for the team as a radar chart in the team dashboard:

Echometer automatically updates the radar chart for you as soon as new data is collected for a variable in Echometer - regardless of whether in team surveys or retrospectives.

Item: We love going to work, and have great fun working together

Facilitation tips:

• What did you enjoy most about your work?
• What has been the most boring part of work for you lately?
• How could we make work more fun / less boring?

 

💡 Learning

Item: We’re learning lots of interesting stuff all the time!

Facilitation tips:

• What kind of task did we learn the least / the most?
• How much time do we take each day to study?
• Which knowledge should be spread more widely in our team?

 

🙏 Support

Item: We always get great support and help when we ask!

Facilitation tips: 

• In which situations did we get stuck due to a lack of support?
• What support have we given others (within our team and beyond)?
• What could have helped us but we didn’t ask for it?

If you like this retro format and questions, you can open them directly in our team development tool Echometer:

Item: We know exactly why we are here, and we are really excited about it.

Facilitation tips:

• Why are we here? Does everyone agree on that?
• Which questions about our common goals have remained unclear to us?
• What makes our mission exciting for us? What is still missing to make it exciting?

 

♟ Pawn or player

Item: We are in control of our destiny! We decide what to build and how to build it.

Facilitation tips: 

• In what situation did we feel like a pawn in a game of chess with no influence on what we build or how we build it?
• What guidelines do we have (or should we have) to prevent this from happening too often?

 

If you like this retro format and questions, you can open them directly in our team development tool Echometer:

Item: We deliver great stuff! We’re proud of it and our stakeholders are really happy.

Facilitation tips: 

• Which topics did not bring the hoped-for benefit? Are there any patterns?
• What are our stakeholders most disappointed about right now?

 

🤖 Suitable process

Item: Our way of working fits us perfectly.

Facilitation tips: 

• What is bothering us about the way we work?
• When was the last time we changed the way we work?
• Which proposed change was never implemented? What is stopping us?

 

🏎 Speed

Item: We get stuff done really quickly. No waiting, no delays.

Facilitation tips: 

• Which requirements / stories got stuck in the implementation?
• What causes delays when they occur?
• What’s a great example of a quick move lately?

 

If you like this retro format and questions, you can open them directly in our team development tool Echometer:

Item: We’re proud of the quality of our code! It is clean, easy to read, and has great test coverage.

Facilitation tips:

• What aspects of our code base are we particularly proud of?
• What technical debts may our team underestimate?
• How quickly did the newest team member become familiar with the code base?

 

⚙️ Easy releasing

Item: Releasing is simple, safe, painless & mostly automated.

Facilitation tips: 

• When was the last time something went wrong with a release?
• What is the biggest pain point in our release process right now?
• What’s an improvement to our release process that we’d all be excited for?

 

If you like this retro format and questions, you can open them directly in our team development tool Echometer:

Tips for Preparing & Conducting the Spotify Health Check Retro Online (with Tool Tip)

Here are a few important tips for retrospectives with the Spotify Health Check - especially if you are doing them online:

• Adapt the Spotify Health Check model to your team Depending on the context, “Tech Quality” and “Easy Releasing” may not suit your team. But that does not mean that the Spotify Health Check model is fundamentally out of the question. Therefore, together with your colleagues, check which aspects from the Spotify Health Check model are really important for your team and simply leave out inapplicable aspects. At the same time, ask which aspects are important in your team that are not covered in the model and add them.
• Use the Spotify Health Check Model continuously Experience has shown that the application of the Spotify Health Check model creates great added value, especially if it is adapted to the needs of the team and then used continuously. At the first retrospective with the model, the team may still be a little overwhelmed with reflecting on the aspects. But after two to three iterations, it will feel quite natural for the team to use the items from the health check in order to come to good results in a targeted manner.
• Avoid tool chaos In order to use the Spotify Health Check model, a tool is often required for the survey, evaluation and implementation of the retrospective. Instead of using several tools that involve media disruptions as well as manual work, it is worth taking a look at tools that collect the process from feedback to document results, automated and standardized across teams.

Therefore, our final tip below is how you can easily set up Spotify Health Check retrospectives online in your team - the video with the 8 steps will help you best. Alternatively, you can also use the text.

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Try the Spotify Team Health Check Tool Right Now in the Next (Online) Retrospective

With Echometer there is a tool that is precisely designed to continuously collect team health, to prepare the results for your team retrospectives and to document the results including the measures.

Here are the simple steps to set up a retrospective with the Spotify Team Health Check with Echometer (And yes, you can Echometer free of charge try out):

1. Send out the Spotify Health Check survey in advance Set up a team, select topics and then simply send the survey to your team. With the survey in Echometer, team members can easily submit their anonymous ratings for the Spotify Health Check as well as open feedback.
2. Start your interactive online retrospective
   Once the feedback from the team is complete, you can start the online retrospective. All team members can connect live online and work together interactively.
3. Record measuresFor all items, past results (if any) are displayed for comparison as well as food for thought, which makes it easy to start a conversation. The reflections can be recorded in the comments.
4. Automatic Spotify Health Check Radar
   After the retrospective, the results from the team health check are then visible to all team members in retrospect on the team’s dashboard.

Credits: Hand photo created by rawpixel.com

Et voila, it can be that simple. If you want to get started right away, start your Echometer trial right now and run the Spotify Team Health Check.

We look forward to your experience reports on Echometer !