40 Ways to Assess Your Tech Team
For CTOs Trying to Better Understand the Capabilities of their Teams
This is a quick brain dump of tactics to evaluate your Engineering Teams.
9-box the team
Apply engineering metrics and track over time
Have the team build an accomplishments list
Interview everyone on the team
Run a performance review process
Speak with adjacent stakeholders
Review the teams LinkedIn profiles
Have people present on various topics
Run a skills assessment
Look at prior project post-mortems
Have the team do self-assessments
Examine prior performance reviews
Run a 360 feedback
Run peer reviews
Establish a goal tracking system
Examine KPI performance
Conduct feedback sessions
Observe daily stand-ups
Run a survey
Audit JIRA (scary, I know)
Talk to customers about the team
Create a scorecard on various factors
Force rank
Run group discussions & debates
Ask staff to maintain a work log
Examine employee NPS
Do a version of mystery shop
Establish a maturity model and see where the team lands
Run a Myers-Briggs type test
Bring in an outside evaluator
Assess delivery vs. the roadmap
Track task completion numbers
Do an offsite team building exercise
Give well defined short-term projects to the team and evaluate
Run an ROI analysis of the team
Evaluate team against company values
Run the team through training & testing and examine the results
Run code analysis software
Compare the team against a career ladder
Have the team develop a SWOT analysis
Observe the team in action and take notes about their behavior
Apply a tool like Linear B