In A Nutshell

Our objective with Product Health assessment is to ensure that we are able to achieve the right rate of delivery of features and the right quality of service for our customers. If our Product Health assessment also recognises that the health of many teams is largely determined by the context in which they work. In a scaled environment, multiple teams can participate in the assessment of the same product.

The health of a product has a large influence on the rate of delivery of features and the quality of service for customers. Teams are unable to deliver at a high rate or to deliver great service if the product context is deficient or defective. Being unable to deliver will frustrate teams and cause their health to suffer too. There is, therefore, a significant overlap between product health and team health.

The link between product health and team health is explicit in the definition of the Scrum framework, where the Product Ownership is explicitly defined as a capability of the team. It is also explicit in team health checks such as the Atlassian Team Health Monitor that includes checks such as “full-time owner”. Other health checks such as the Spotify Squad Health Check are less explicit, though implicit links exist in factors such as “mission” and “delivering value”.

The Product Health Check is undertaken by the team (or teams) for their own improvement. We avoid incentivising the process to discourage the tendency to game the process in order to “look good”. Leadership should avoid direct comparison between products because of the different priority, experience and context of each product. There may be value in looking at common trends shared across products. These may indicate the influence of organisational changes and improvements.