Team Growth Canvas

Purpose

Agile teams often struggle with limited impact from improvement initiatives. This leads to:

• Hollowed-out agile practices
• Fading organizational support
• Team and stakeholder indifference

Common reasons include:

• Lack of structural improvements
• Isolated initiatives
• Insufficient organizational support
• Unclear direction
• Limited know-how

To address these issues, we need to make improvement efforts more impactful and effective. The goal is to achieve measurable, tangible, and sustainable results that enhance team effectiveness and maturity.

The Team Growth Canvas is a practical tool for Scrum Masters, agile team coaches, and team leads to make team improvement more tangible and purposeful.

Key Components

1. Stakeholder Identification: Identify and prioritize stakeholders who can provide input on team growth.
2. Existing Pains: List and rank current team challenges by negative impact.
3. Current Strengths: Identify the team's existing strengths.
4. Team Boundaries: Define constraints and opportunities for team growth.
5. Long-term Team Goal: Describe an outcome-oriented vision of an improved team.
6. Key Metrics: Establish measures to track progress towards the long-term goal.
7. Cadence: Set planning and review intervals for short, mid, and long-term goals.
8. Possible Improvement Experiments: List and prioritize potential experiments.
9. Next Growth Opportunity: Choose the first improvement experiment to implement.
10. Non-negotiables: Define the team's core rules and values.

Team Growth Canvas Overview

Figure 1: Visual representation of the Team Growth Canvas

Get the Team Growth Canvas template.

About the Authors

The Team Growth Canvas is developed by Frederik Vannieuwenhuyse and Philippe Vandessel, with support from iLean. Contact us on LinkedIn for more information.