2 Fs for team productivity: Flow and Frequent Integration

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Some individual productivity practices translate well to team productivity

Team productivity has factors that overlap with individual productivity:

• Increasing focus, by reducing multi-tasking and interruption;
• Frequent customer feedback, via regular demos, user testing, releasing to early adopters, etc.;
• Reducing friction. For teams, this is typically around lack of clarity of direction, lack of agreement on how to work together, clunky tooling and/or technology, etc.

However, team productivity goes beyond just a translation of individual productivity practices.

• Optimise for flow by watching the work product, not the workers;
• Frequent integration

Watch the work product, not the workers

Let’s imagine that you optimise for team member utilisation, that is, team members should spend most of their time on value-adding activities, especially activities associated with each person’s particular specialties so as not to waste their individual talents.

This sounds very reasonable and is guaranteed to slow completion times.

Let’s imagine a team working on a single initiative that is bottlenecked on a single team member who is extremely…