I want to talk about the best bands. The Beatles? The Stones? The Clash?…no no no, not that kind of band. I’m talking health and fitness!
The infamous Whoop Band
One of my colleagues, I won’t name names, is a faithful user of the Whoop Band.
(Okay, it’s Mark Pushinsky).
If you’re not familiar with the Whoop Band, per their website it’s “the latest, most advanced fitness and health wearable available.” And I must admit, it sounds pretty cool. It tracks your heart rate, sleep patterns, and even your "strain" (which seems to be a fancy way of saying how hard you worked out). But as far as I can tell, the real reason people buy them is to brag about their metrics to their friends. "Oh, you didn't know? I've been in the orange zone for the past hour. Yeah, I'm just that fit."
In my house, I have a different band that tells me an awful lot about how fit I am.
It’s called the waistband.
The “Whoop Band”
Just like the Whoop Band, it’s wearable. The waistband has proven to behave both as a leading and lagging indicator of my health. It’s easy to read, inexpensive, doesn’t require recharging, and has been historically accurate for 49 years and counting.
So which is the best band?
Well, the Whoop Band provides “personalized recommendations and coaching feedback.” So does my waistband. It communicates things like “Hey, Doug, maybe you should lay off the Little Debbies.”
The Whoop Band provides real time feedback when it spots high-risk situations. So does my waistband. The button pops off my pants when I bend over to grab that Swiss Cake Roll.
I’m sure the Whoop does more, but I’m not sure I really need it. The waistband is absolutely the simplest tool I have to evaluate my health. So for me, for now, I’d say the waistband is just fine.
When it comes to team health, I think we as Agile coaches often fall into the same trap of over-complicating things. How often do teams choose the simplest thing possible to evaluate progress? It can sometimes be easy to get enamored with the kind of data the Whoop Band promises. Believing we need elaborate dashboards with dozens of KPI, when in reality all we had to do was ask them if their pants were getting tighter. I wonder if teams know what their “waistband” metrics really are.
Of course, not all teams will have the same simple health measures. For some teams it might be the number of in-flight projects, unused vacation days, how many e-mails they send per week…etc. The point here is that teams should understand their “waistband” metrics and the drivers of those simple things, before they adopt anything more elaborate. Sometimes less is more.
I once worked with a team where the volume of trouble tickets was up 20%, they were feeling “crushed.” Reducing the total number of tickets seems like an obvious fix, but it turns out reducing the number of in-process tickets made a much bigger difference. In flight tickets was their “waistband metric” -- anything over 2 active tickets per person and they started to feel bloated.
As teams start to adopt BI dashboards, advanced metrics, and the like, I think the real question they should ask themselves is, are these tools actually making a difference? Do they have a dashboard because it helps drive decision making, or just to say they do? Oftentimes, in reality, there’s probably a small handful of metrics and visualizations that will do the trick. As agile coaches and team members, we should remember to start simple, and only layer on more data as needed.
Did someone say layers!? I suddenly want cake.
There goes my waistband.
Metrics create alignment, provide focus, and allow us to track progress toward our goals. Learn more about how Hard Yards can help you with measurement/