Building high-performing teams through continuous improvement

At Intercom, we’ve always focused on building excellent products which our customers value and love. Continuing to meet this goal as we scale means constantly re-evaluating how our teams work to keep performing at their very best. We’ve developed a way to measure and address the challenges that prevent our R&D teams from performing at the best.

Why should we focus on how teams work?

If one team’s performance starts to slip and isn’t quickly corrected, other teams’ performance will be affected – with company-wide implications

• A team that isn’t growing or adapting is stagnating
• To continue to strategically grow in the way we want, we need to consistently strive for high performance across teams

Four steps of HPT framework

Measure: Take your measurements to identify the strengths and challenges that exist for the team

• Act: Get the team together and review the measurements
• Review: Close out any open actions
• Share: Pick out the actions that worked
• Add them to the shared team playbook to create a global resource and share your learnings with other teams

HPT experience

Intercom implemented the HPT framework to pinpoint the most important team improvements

• One of the top problems initially reported was feedback
• The team introduced always-on feedback through our feedback tool
• Team members were given the option to request and receive feedback every six weeks
• Each team member customized feedback requests to reflect a current project or task they were working on to make feedback as relevant as possible

Better support through transparency

It’s easier for teams to bubble up common external challenges so that appropriate support can be given

Setting our goals

Start with the problem, think big, start small, learn fast, deliver outcomes

• Alignment
• Continuous improvement
• Shared learning
• Universal metrics and parameters so that information can be clearly understood by other teams
• Intercom’s product principles are “Start with the Problem”, “Think big, Start small, Learn fast, Deliver outcomes”

Some of the ‘plays’ implemented

Share and discuss rationales behind decisions to de-prioritize or drop goals during a cycle

• Create a more structured and efficient on-call rotation process
• Introduce an “X in 15 minutes” session every week
• Organize workshops for sharing personal goals within teams to facilitate greater support of individual growth

Implementing the HPT framework

First implemented the High-Performing Teams (HPT) framework in early 2020 to focus on team alignment, continuous improvement of processes, and collaboration

Shared Learning and Collaboration

To improve these elements for version 1, we focused on

• Building out a resource hub for codified challenges and actions
• Connecting individuals at all levels to collaborate on challenges through the framework
• Making cross-team collaboration easy and obvious

Next steps

We’re keen to maintain the high adoption and engagement with HPT that we’ve seen so far and we’re turning our attention to the impact our actions can have.

Application

Stay focused on the how and why of using the HPT framework within the team.

• If the team loses sight of why they’re doing this – or becomes frustrated with the process
• HPT itself becomes a blocker to high performance
• Thinking deeply about how we build is as important as thinking deeply about what we build

From version 0.5 to version 1

The first iteration of HPT wasn’t implemented as effectively as they’d hoped, and highlighted some problems that they’ve tried to address in the subsequent version.

Refreshing the HPT framework

HPT was initially engineering-biased

• It needed a more cross-disciplinary approach to better incorporate the perspectives of Product and Design.
• In late 2020, they revived and refreshed the framework to produce v1.0
• The following principles helped build HPT into a more valuable framework for their teams.

A team-first approach

The framework should work for teams, not the other way around.

Source