Building a Team Playbook (Experimenting with The Atlassian Team Playbook to Make Your Own)
Atlassian made its Playbook publicly available in late 2016 and has been building on it since to provide a plethora of resources that are completely free.
I highly recommend that your team at least takes a look through this high-quality resource and experiment with its concepts.
This post will not go into how awesome the Atlassian Playbook is (very), but rather how it can be used as a base template to experiment off of and mould your very own Playbook.
Our team gradually adopted parts of the Playbook during the last few months. As we mastered the variety of plays, we became curious about how to take them further.
We eventually saw an opportunity to personalize this structure better to reflect our team’s culture and values. Here’s the gradual practice we used:
- Gather Your Core Values. You know, those buzzwords that sit in a company mission statement somewhere. These usually come in 3–9 concepts essential to your team’s/company’s practices and product design. If these are not defined, and your team is free to define these independently, I’d suggest starting with this exercise first. Our team initially chose Flow, Empathy, and Trust.
2. Rank Your Core Values. Run the trade-off slider play, but replace the software metrics with your team’s 3–9 core values. Your team should aim to have these core values distinctly ranked from most important to least important. We ranked ours Trust, Empathy, then Flow.
3. Add the Most Important Core Value to Your Health Monitor. On the next health monitor check-in, add the top-ranked core value along with a definition (determined in step 1) to the health monitor as a new attribute. Only add one at a time to gradually build up and thoroughly test new attributes on a solid foundation. There will certainly be redundancies and potential contradictions with the default set of attributes, but keep in mind that the spirit of this is meant to be experimental and iterative. Rate the new attribute’s health as your team would normally for the other default attributes.
4. Create or Determine 1–2 Plays to Address New Attribute’s Health. This is the fun part — with your team, come up with some exercises to specifically address pain points related to the new attribute. This might be unnecessary if your team believes that the current set of plays is sufficient to address the attribute, which is totally okay. For example, one of our team’s new attributes, Flow, was defined as:
“The ability for the team to work with as little distraction and as much focus as possible. This will increase the likelihood that we reach a state of flow that results in higher productivity, quality, and benefits for our users.”
Some of this is addressed in existing plays — such as the daily stand-up when asked, “What are your blockers?” but we determined that less immediate environmental blockers get missed. To address this, we created the Clean Your Room play, where the team initially gathers for 15–20 minutes to discuss methods to achieve better flow. We discuss questions like:
- What is an acceptable disruption to Flow? (Family calls, service disruptions on production, etc…)
- Who is currently been disrupting your flow, and has it been worthwhile? (email/Slack notifications, team discussions that don’t require your input, etc…)
- Has anything technical been disrupting your flow? (slow connectivity, broken headphones, etc…)
- How do you visualize your ideal flow state? (Are you alone? In a group? Where is the rest of the team? How do you reach them if you need them? How do they reach you? What counts as a reason to distract you or your teammates?)
After we discuss any strategies teammates have been using that have been beneficial to their personal flow, once action items are gathered, the team is given 40–60 minutes to “clean their room.” Our team is free to do anything physical or digital to alleviate any flow blockers we might not feel comfortable with during regular work hours. Some things that I’ve seen people use the time for:
- Move or rearrange desks
- Download browser extensions to limit notifications
- Play with their phone settings to limit notifications
- Tidy paperwork
- Perform a computer clean-up/organize their computer files
- Restock drawers (stationary, foodstuff, etc…)
- Run errands (buy new headphones or personal stuff that may be blocking them from reaching flow.)
- Personal care (go to the gym, take a coffee break, go for a walk, etc…)
Basically, anything goes as long as each member is back by the allotted time and they feel that their chosen activity will help them focus long-term once the play is over.
5. Try Using a New Play From Step 4. If your team has determined that your new attribute needs some help, try out a custom play and observe how well your team engages in it. Note down any points of confusion or friction, and get your team to write down anything that comes to mind.
6. Revisit Results in the Next Health Monitor Check-in. Perform a mini-retrospective on the custom play to see what the team thought went well and what could have been done better. Also, cross-references the attribute with the other attributes on the health monitor. Are there any adjustments needed? Should the new attribute remain in the health monitor? Is the team ready to experiment with a new attribute?
From our team’s Clean Your Room play, we did iterate on the discussion questions as our environment evolved as a result of running this play. We managed to get a quieter office space for our team from the open space that we had before. This changed some of the dynamics and strategies we were interested in as a result.
7. Share. Part of the purpose and general ethos around this effort is to help unleash the potential of every team. Sharing your team’s results can potentially help other teams grow through your experiences. By all means, only share if your team is comfortable with it, but do take a look at the Playbook’s about page to get a deeper understanding of the motivations driving this innovation.
8. Repeat Steps 4–8 for Other Core Values.
This practice is intended to be purely descriptive and not prescriptive.
I hope other teams find this useful in growing their teams and show how the Atlassian Team Playbook can be moulded to benefit teams of broad varieties.
Always remember that great teams, not great individuals, build great software and great businesses.
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