How to Assess Your Team

 

Assessing your team shouldn't come down to a gut feeling.

These 2 objective tests take the guesswork out:

Perhaps you've been in this situation before...

You've been avoiding one conversation for months.
You know the person isn't quite working out.

But every time you go to raise it, it feels too personal, so you let it slide another week.

Then another...

The reason why this feels hard is that you're treating it as a verdict on them as a human being.

But the job was never to decide whether someone is good or bad.
It's to measure one thing: fit.

Once you make it about the seat, the charge drains right out of it.

Two questions do the measuring for you (which founders often wrongly blur into one):

1. Right person: do they live your Core Values?
2. Right seat: do they GWC it?

Here's how each one works...

Right person is about values fit.
Your Core Values aren't something you invent.
They're beliefs and practices that already exist.

Look at your best people and name the traits they share.
Then rate each person against it: plus, plus/minus, or minus on whether they consistently live it.

Right seat is about GWC.

Your Accountability Chart defines what the seat actually needs.

GWC tests whether the person fits it:

- Get it: do they truly grasp what the seat demands?
- Want it: do they want the seat itself, not just the title or the paycheck?
- Capacity: do they have the time, skill, and bandwidth to do it well?

One important thing: GWC isn't a score for how good someone is.
It's a yes/no filter for the seat. A single no means they don't GWC it.

Now the part that makes this stop being personal.

Put the two tests together and you get 4 outcomes, and the outcome tells you what to do:

🟢 Right person, right seat: keep them, back them, let them run.

🟡 Right person, wrong seat: shared values, wrong fit. Find a seat they GWC before you give up on them.

⚠️ Wrong person, right seat: great at the work, off on values. The hardest call, but still a no.

🔴 Wrong person, wrong seat: it's time to make the call.

And when it's time to talk, you coach, you don't ambush:

- Name it plainly and kindly, with real examples so they can see the gap.
- Give time to change. Raise it, allow around 30 days, extend once if there's honest effort.
- If nothing shifts, make the call.

Short-term discomfort beats long-term drag every time.
And the person in the wrong fit almost always ends up better off once it's resolved.

Credits to Mark O'Donnell, make sure to follow

5 types of team members

 

In every team, you’ll find a unique blend of personalities that turns the average project into a psychological thriller. It’s a delicate balance: you need the Visionary who dreams of "disrupting the industry," but you absolutely must have the Professional Skeptic who reminds them that we still haven't figured out how to use the communal scanner. Every group has that one person who treats a "casual touch-base" like a TED Talk, and another who has mastered the art of being "camera-off" on Zoom so effectively that you’re fairly certain they’ve been replaced by a very sophisticated house cat. You have the Formatting Police—who will let a billion-dollar idea slide but will physically vibrate if they see a font change in a sub-bullet—and the Deadline Daredevil, who views "COB Wednesday" as a mere suggestion or a distant goalpost.

Success isn't about having a room full of clones; it's about the chaotic magic that happens when the person who wants to change the world meets the person who just wants to make sure the "Attach File" button actually worked.

Here are five types of team members you’re likely to encounter:

​1. The Star Performer (The "Main Character")
​This is the powerhouse. They don’t just meet the bar; they are the bar. They’re fueled by a mix of caffeine and a relentless pursuit of excellence that makes the rest of us wonder if they’ve discovered a 25th hour in the day.

​2. The Efficient Doer (The "Silent Engine")
​The reliable workhorse who treats their To-Do list like a personal vendetta. They aren't interested in the limelight or the "synergy" speeches; they just want to clear the deck. If they ever leave, the company likely collapses in 48 hours.

​3. The Steady Contributor (The "Growth Project")
​They’re the heart of the team, even if they aren't leading the pack yet. They might miss a beat occasionally, but with a bit of mentoring and a nudge in the right direction, they’re the future backbone of the operation.

​4. The Disruptor (The "Wild Card")
​Every team has one person who treats the status quo like a personal insult. While their "alternative energy" can throw off the vibe, if you can point that chaos in a productive direction, they’re often the ones who find the shortcut no one else saw.

​5. The Saboteur (The "Plot Twist")
​Whether it’s through accidental "reply-all" disasters or deliberate bottlenecking, this person is the hurdle. Identifying them isn't about office politics—it's about survival. You have to handle the friction early before the "thriller" becomes a tragedy.

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Managing Cadence and Stress for Optimal Team Performance

 

Optimizing team performance is high on the priority list for most organizations, and therefore, it is well-studied. While this information seems obvious to some, especially those who have been in business for a long time, I believe it is worth revisiting. I developed the charts included in this post over the years and find that they offer a unique graphical view that I haven’t seen elsewhere. To maximize team performance, you have to manage the cadence and stress at the individual, team, and organizational level.

When you look at a team, it has a level of work rate. Large companies, in particular, strive to make that relatively uniform across business units and over time.

They want common work hours, universal effort, and uniform productivity levels and have systems in place to ensure this. I find that these systems lead toward average performance, though. I have especially observed this in government service. 

A manager’s job is to discover ways for their team to perform better than average. If you look at it, you have a lot of people who are essentially working at a normal work rate as time progresses. The amount of work completed is the work rate multiplied by time. Productivity is the amount of work per unit of time. In the image below, the amount of work is represented by the shaded area.

Marathon Cadence

What frequently happens is a new manager comes in and wants to increase productivity, so they raise the excitement level and inject enthusiasm over how important this project is. They motivate people to work harder, and the marathon starts.

This continues for a time, but ultimately, the marathon cannot be sustained. People can’t work at an increased rate for too long before they start to burn out. The good news, however, is that the work done during that time was above the normal work rate as represented by the green area in the following image. 

That’s good! The new manager took the reins, whipped up the team, and they produced extra work. But then it begins to taper off. The real challenge is that after the team members burn out, their productivity levels decrease, dropping below the normal work rate. It’s challenging to get back to the average level.

As time passes, the amount of work under the curve, represented by the red shading, becomes larger than the green area. The extra effort spent to get above and beyond the normal work rate is now erased, leading to less than average. By motivating the team to work harder, the manager actually caused a decrease in performance in the long run. 

Sprint Cadence

Much of the software industry uses agile development strategies, which have now spread to other sectors. The idea is to use sprints, which are quick bursts of energy to finish projects. These are especially common in the U.S. where we like to get in, finish the job, and get out. The problem is that to maintain this, we must build in recovery time because it is not possible to conduct a sprint and then return immediately to the normal work rate or into the next sprint. Ideally, we want a development cycle that looks like this:

After a sprint, at least for a time, productivity drops. If we build in recovery time after each sprint, however, this approach leads to less burnout in the long run.

It’s clear from this image that the amount of green work exceeds the red. This process leads to higher-performing teams than a constant work rate or a marathon cadence. This extra productivity is great, but if you start a sprint and it isn’t managed correctly, such that the team only partially recovers, then the results are only slightly better than a marathon.

Properly Managing a Sprint

I find a better strategy is to complete a sprint, roll people off, and let them recover. Announce the next sprint, and follow the same process. Work, recover, work, recover. I also find that typically the first sprint results in slightly more work than subsequent ones, but a cadence establishes. The ultimate goal is to have the work above the normal work rate (green) be greater than the work below (red) the line, meaning higher than average performance. If you can’t maintain that, then aim for a constant normal work rate. 

The Impacts of Stress 

Along the same line, stress plays an important role in the psyche of the team. Psychologists have studied for decades how individuals respond to stressors. They noted that as stress levels increase, productivity increases, but at some point, it starts to fall because the stress is too high and the person can’t keep up. But note that everyone has a slightly different peak for where that level is and how much stress they can take on.

For example, in school, some students push off studying until the test or assignment nears. As they get closer to the due date, they are motivated and can really get the work done. Employees are the same way in that they have specific projects due, and they work better when they are down to the last few days to complete it. This is as opposed to plotting it out in advance and allocating the necessary time to work it in without rushing.

From a productivity point of view, that works for many people. However, when looking at this from a creativity point of view, I find the approach doesn’t work on the same time scale. People observe that when creativity enters into the equation, the peak happens sooner.

While a little stress causes a peak in creativity, it quickly tapers off, much sooner than for productivity. A little bit of stress is good. Teams should get out there, create, and innovate! But when the stress starts to feel too intense, innovation falls sooner than work output.

As a manager, it’s important to understand this at an individual, team, and corporate level. Work with employees to begin creative work sooner and find ways to reduce their stress level. If the work is merely to bang it out, then find a way to put enough stress into the equation. Think about these curves for your team and find the correct amount of stress for individuals to maximize production for your organization.

What is the appropriate level for creativity? A manager must find a way to create space for them to come up with ideas. Creativity doesn’t just happen, so one must allocate the necessary time instead of wanting it immediately. Scheduling time for innovation is hard and requires that the employee and manager work together to make it happen.

There’s a cartoon by Sidney Harris with two scientists standing at a chalkboard with several equations written on it. In the middle of the board, it says, “Then a miracle occurs.” This is the innovation step and requires time.

When you aggregate all the individuals, there is a corporate performance level where the organization itself has a certain level of stress. People have noticed that when you try to stress an organization in whole that the optimal stress level happens at a lower level than it does for key individuals. Still, everyone reaches their peak at a different point.

To stress the organization, the leader may say, “We have to meet this goal, and we need to do it in a month.” The key is to follow up with the performers who function better under higher stress and provide the additional motivation they need. For those who don’t perform well under pressure, ensure that they have the correct amount.

Bottom Line

To have a high-performing, optimized team, a leader must focus on the cadence of development to keep employees motivated but not burned out. Managing the stress level of individuals as well as for the organization provides a culture that includes time for innovation and creativity and an incentive for productivity. 

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Five Signs Your Product Team Is More Capable Than You Think

 

By NICK EVANS

There are lots of places you can go to hear about the obvious signals of a capable product team, a product that goes from idea to unicorn in a matter of a few years, or one that revolutionises an area and disrupts incumbents. But what about the not-so-obvious signals that indicate you’re operating with a capable team?

Humans are conditioned to look for negatives and things that might be missing. This positive-negative asymmetry can damage relationships and make it harder to generate trust and empower teams.

So, the next time you catch yourself thinking about the things you wish you had, take a second look and see if you can spot the following:

Your New Employees Hit The Ground Running

Good product managers know what good product management looks like regardless of their domain. They bring a set of tools with them that traverse multiple industries and product types.

They can deliver value almost immediately by getting in front of customers and teasing out pain points and opportunities. In parallel, good product managers will simultaneously work to develop a deeper understanding of their new domain to deliver more value sooner.

Your Team Is Actively Chasing & Sharing New Knowledge

The best teams never stop being students.

The very best teams might even embed a culture of coaching through a formalised product coach role. But creating a culture of coaching and learning through a formalised role isn’t the only way to know if you’ve got a great product team on your hands.

Great product teams
proactively share learnings.

They might post about a new research technique they used via Slack or Teams, or they might share a link to a blog from a product leader and go that step further with insights about how they’ve adapted this guidance in their day-to-day work.

Furthermore, great product organisations create the space to nurture this culture. That goes beyond ‘brown bag’ or ‘lunch & learn’ sessions; it’s about facilitated learning through structure and investment.

They Consistently Run Effective & Valuable Meetings

Remember that meeting where you walked out thinking, “Wow, that was both efficient and effective. I wish all meetings could be like that!”?

Well, good product teams run their meetings this way!

And it’s not just that a good meeting equals a capable team; the hidden signal is that good product teams know their time is precious.

As a product manager, there are almost endless activities you could be doing to manage the entire lifecycle of your products effectively. Meetings may be necessary, but they must also be optimised and distilled down to their most valuable components.

When you see a product manager run meetings with this mindset, you’ll know they’re maximising meetings for value.

They Smile When Things Seem Impossible

Good product teams love it when things are broken.

Good product teams get a little excited at the prospect of tackling a really tough problem. They see their best value add is often taking the most broken core customer experience in a product and maximising its value (or maybe even removing it altogether).

They don’t shy away from a big, difficult, valuable problem to look for something smaller and easier. Good product managers love using their empathy to step into their customers’ shoes and solve real problems that make a TRUE difference for customers and for the organisation.

So, when things don’t seem to be going your way, and the molehill to climb has turned into a mountain, but your product team are as motivated as ever, you’ll know you’re onto a good thing.

Talking To Customers Is ALWAYS In Their Job Description

It’s so easy to make speaking with customers someone else’s job, but the best product teams and leaders know that no amount of translation or summarising can replace engaging with real customers.

Having the whole product team regularly and actively engaging with customers has an outsized impact on the success of your products and business.

When product teams and leaders spend time with customers, they make better decisions, understand the REAL value and impact to customers of what is being built, and avoid falling into all the traps of thinking you “know your customers, because you are your customers”.

 

If you’re now looking at your product team and noticing the above signs, then you’ll be happy to know that they’re quietly achieving more than you realised, and you’re in a really good position for future success.

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