Henrik Kniberg says that Squads at Spotify are using Big Visible Improvement Boards that focus on one to three Actionable Accelerators like:
- What is blocking us?
Also, the board shows a Definition of Awesome that includes things like:
- Really finishing stuff.
- Easily ramping up new team members.
- No recurring tasks or bugs.
Beyond that, the Definition of Awesome Architecture makes explicit:
- I can build, test, and ship my feature within a week; and
- I use data to learn from it; and
- my improved version is live in week two.
Awesome is a direction, not a place, so it does not even have to be realistic. The Squads use a Definition of Awesome to help focus improvements and track progress.
The Improvement Board is inspired by a technique called Toyota Kata, showing:
- current situation;
- target situation in the form of a Definition of Awesome telling a little story about the perfect world;
- realistic next target condition that is one step closer to awesome; and
- next three steps, actions that take you to the realistic next target condition;
When these get done, the Squad fills them up with new improvement actions. This section also shows a little week calendar.
The Improvement Board is very similar to an A3 Solver, a pattern or Pearl, and the general Beyond Bullet Points structure.
