We often hear ‘high-performance’ but what does it mean and what does a high-performing team do.

Let’s assume a vision, roadmap, and a surrounding culture that is progressive and forward thinking is already in place.

The recipe:

• Great blend of skills, experience, and ability to be cross-functional (DevOps, Testing, Engineers, and UX/Design)
• A servant leader with vision who supports and creates the right conditions for performance
• A business/product rep who knows the customers, market and product and can translate this into stories
• Some experienced tech leaders and emerging talent, lots of diversity — male/female etc.

The behaviours/characteristics:

• Delivering value to customers little and often
• Automating everything possible (testing, deployments, tooling etc.)
• Following a fluid Kanban approach — tackling things in near/real-time
• High amounts of trust and support (empowerment)
• Lots of co-creation and pairing around complex issues
• Swarming as a group around sticky problems
• Always learning and introducing improvements (inspecting and adapting)
• Pushing information to leadership as required
• Utilising near/real-time data to determine performance and service health
• Challenging and not simply saying yes to requests
• Putting quality before anything else, but being pragmatic about delivery
• Independent but aligned to the wider organisation (knowledge curation)
• Give back to the industry and prob tackling side projects