Guest post: At Agile Stationery, we love hearing from experts who help teams work smarter. In this post, David Jimenez Sequero at T5 Digital shares his experience using the Squad Health Check deck. A simple but powerful tool for team reflection, and he's got plenty of real-world insights and lessons to help you make the most of it.
The Squad Health Check, also known as the Spotify Health Check, as it was popularised by the Swedish music streaming services company, is one of our favourite tools at T5 Digital for fostering team improvement. It gives teams a clear voice to share their challenges and successes, giving them another channel to get the right support from their wider organisation.
I’ve run many Squad Health Checks for different companies and team shapes over the years. I have found that a well run health check can be an engaging way for a team to reflect and improve, even if they’re not used to running the more conventional Agile retrospectives.
Today I want to explore one example of how we used the Squad Health Check model with one of our clients, how it went, and the lessons we learned.
What is the Squad Health Check?
The Squad Health Check (or just health check for short) is a self-reflection tool teams can use to produce a snapshot of their overall state at any one point. Think of it as taking the team’s pulse. The health check high level approach encourages the team to take a step back and assess their current situation, challenges and constraints in a broader way. It complements the more specific, day-to-day nature of retrospectives, as it highlights matters that may not be discussed as often in them.
A health check allows the team and their managers to identify key organisational areas to improve on that may necessitate a more strategic approach. The output is concise so the teams that practice these sessions can easily share it with the people they report into. This allows the leadership team to learn the areas of focus to help improve every team situation, to identify common areas of concern or, on the other hand, areas that are working well across their organisation. However, it is critical for managers not to use the health check as a metric of a team’s performance or to compare them against other teams.
Our experience running the Squad Health Check
During my recent consulting engagement with an established financial services organisation, I had the opportunity to conduct a couple of Squad Health Checks for one of their development teams. I worked with the squad’s Delivery Lead to prepare the structure of the session, write down the specific scoring criteria that were relevant to them, and shared many of the tips you’re reading here now!
We booked a meeting room for one hour at the office and got our deck of cards ready for the exercise. The Delivery Lead took on the role of Facilitator and dealt each person three cards to cast their votes during the session:
● A red vote means you think the team is struggling a lot in this area
● A yellow/amber vote means you think the team is not doing too bad in this area but there’s room for improvement
● A green vote means the team is doing really well in this area and you can’t think of any obvious improvements to make. Let’s pat ourselves on the back!
The Facilitator then explained the structure and objectives of the session, and went through the remaining pile of cards in the deck and read them out loud for the group, explaining each category in the health check scoring criteria and answering any questions about them.
The scoring criteria for the Squad Health Check are very diverse and they should be tailored to the individual situation of the team and the organisation running the exercise for best results. The categories proposed in the original Spotify Squad Health Check templates and guides are a great starting point but certainly not the only ones that matter!
Our scoring sheet included questions from the original Spotify templates, such as “Easy to release”, “Pawns or Players”, as well as some interesting, additional ones from our Squad Health Check card deck, like “Psychological Safety”, “Tech Quality” or “Teams Around Us”. All in all, the categories in the card were pretty aligned to the classic Spotify categories. Whatever categories you use, be clear about which ones are in the team’s remit to fix and which ones need to be escalated or discussed with other parts of the business (e.g. team makeup, paid tools).
The success of any Squad Health Check heavily depends on how it's facilitated. In our case, people were very engaged as the facilitator did an excellent job of taking a step back, without imposing their own views or opinions, and ensuring that everyone had plenty of time to voice their thoughts. Again, the key here is quality, not quantity. Giving each individual in the team plenty of space to open up and speak their minds is what truly makes these sessions valuable.
As for the practical aspects of running these sessions, we experimented with different approaches. During our first health check, we captured the categories and votes on a physical flip chart which we later digitised on a Miro board. When we ran the second session a couple of months later, we streamlined the process by recording everything directly on Miro using the template we had created previously. This helped us save a bit of prep time during the exercise, as well as making it easier to share the results with people from the business later.
While it is entirely possible to run a Squad Health Check remotely, we met at the office every couple of months, so we decided to make the most of these in-person opportunities. Running our health checks face-to-face not only made the sessions more fun and sociable, but also allowed us to use tangible props like flip boards and voting cards. These physical elements created a more interactive experience, encouraging team members to move around the room, visibly commit to their votes, and engage in more animated discussions than a purely digital session might have inspired.
The challenges we encountered
Focusing too much on the uncontrollable
It’s perfectly OK to raise concerns about things the team doesn't feel empowered to change, but don’t let these dominate the conversation. Even though the output of these sessions could be shared with managers (where they will hopefully act on it), this is also a self-reflection tool to help the team unearth broader patterns of work that may be hurting or helping their productivity and wellbeing. By understanding these patterns, we can identify areas within our control to make meaningful improvements, whilst also documenting larger systemic issues that need leadership attention.
Overlapping categories
We experimented with slightly different Squad Health Check scoring sheets between the two sessions we ran. This was great as it helped us find the categories that resonated the most with the team, but it also led to a few overlapping themes and a couple of instances where we wasted some time discussing the same problem but in different ways.
This is a natural part of a team’s health check journey though. As we get more experienced running these sessions and find the topics and markers we care about the most, the discussions become more focused and effective.
Lessons learned
The Spotify Squad Health Check is most helpful when run periodically. I ran two sessions with this particular client. We were able to establish a baseline in the first one and then compare the state of the team a couple of months later to identify which areas were showing signs of improvement or otherwise!
We gained two main insights from this exercise:
● Validated the issues the team wanted to raise to the leadership team. These were concerns and suggestions grounded on consensus, as opposed to one or two individual’s opinions. This gave us yet another way to present and frame this feedback and issues to the leadership team.
● Conversely, we uncovered a couple of surprising insights that helped the team put their current situation into perspective. Some things, like how empowered the team truly felt (“Pawns or Players”) seemed more positive when the whole team’s voices were heard.
Final thoughts
The Spotify Squad health check is a simple but effective tool in my arsenal to help teams foster an honest and constructive environment to improve and engage their leadership team in meaningful ways. I would urge you to try it too! And do bear in mind that, like most things involving people working and communicating together, there is no one right way to do it. Even Spotify themselves have iterated on their own approach over the years.
The key is simply to begin. Pencil in your first health check with your team in the next few weeks, reflect on what you learn, and use those insights to shape your next session. As your team grows more comfortable with the process, you'll develop a rhythm and method that works for you. What matters most isn't the frequency or format, but the meaningful conversations and improvements that emerge from these sessions.
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About T5 Digital
T5 Digital is a consultancy specialising in digital transformation, Agile delivery, and cloud strategy, helping businesses optimise technology and streamline operations.
