Spotify Health Check: Everything You Need To Know

In this article, I’ll explain how the Spotify Health Check works, who it’s suitable for, and what you need to keep in mind to ensure your company will benefit from it.

What Is the Spotify Health Check Model?

The Spotify Health Check is a survey (often in the form of a workshop) in which teams look back on their work to date and evaluate it. The model goes back to the Swedish audio streaming service: Spotify

Teams use various indicators for collaboration, value creation, fun, and learning experience in the Spotify Health Check to assess the status quo of their project and collaboration. If you want to understand the organizational design behind it, you can find an overview here of the Agile Spotify Model .

I will explain exactly which indicators the Spotify Health Check Model uses and what they mean in a moment.

Spotify Health Check in video

By the way, if you prefer to consume content via videos: This short video is a piece I published with the most important facts and 6 tips about the Spotify Health Check:

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Why the Spotify Health Check is better than classic KPIs and other agile metrics

Basically, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) work like a thermometer. You can use them to check whether you are sick and whether you should perhaps take a paracetamol to feel better. KPIs reveal where the problems lie and whether you need to change something to improve the figures – so that your project becomes healthy.

The problem with this approach is often that many KPIs only kick in when something may have already gone wrong. When the damage has already been done and it takes a lot of time and effort to correct it.

But what if you already preemptively check how the ongoing health of your team or project is doing?

This is exactly what the Spotify Health Check does. With the Spotify Health Check, you don’t measure your medical health, but the health of your team, your collaboration, and the processes in the team in a preventive way.

The indicators / dimensions in the Spotify Health Check

The Spotify Health Check provides 11 indicators – Spotify calls them dimensions – that teams and squads can use to look back on their work.

Here are the 11 dimensions with the respective definitions of “Good” and “Bad”:

dimension	Good	Bad
Value generation	We deliver great results. We are proud of that and our stakeholders are very satisfied.	We deliver total rubbish. We are ashamed of it. Our stakeholders hate us for it.
Easy to release	Releasing is easy, safe, painless and mostly automatic.	Releasing is risky, painful, a lot of work and takes forever.
Fun	We love going to work and have a lot of fun together.	Work is boring.
Health of the codebase	We are proud of our code quality. The code is clean, easy to read and has a high test coverage.	Our code is a pile of rubbish and the technical debts are out of control.
Learning	We are constantly learning.	We never have time to educate ourselves.
mission	We know why we are here and we are really excited about it.	We have no idea why we are here. There is no big picture or focus. Our so-called mission is completely unclear and uninspiring.
Player or farmer	We have our destiny in our own hands. We decide what we develop and how we develop it.	We are just pawns in a chess game. We have no influence on what we develop or how we develop it.
speed	We get tasks done quickly. No waiting and no delays.	We never seem to finish anything. We are constantly interrupted or cannot move forward. Our progress is always slowed down by dependencies.
Appropriate processes	Our way of working suits us perfectly.	Our way of working is bad.
Support	We always get great support when we need it.	We are not making progress because we are not getting the support we need.
Teamwork	We are a great team that works well together.	We are a bunch of individuals who neither know nor care what the others on the team are doing.

How can teams use the indicators of the Spotify Health Check?

In order to use the indicators in a survey and then reflect on them in a retrospective, teams can fall back on simple traffic light colors:

• 🟢 GREEN: Things are going very well. This doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. However, the team or squad is satisfied and sees no great need for improvement. 
• 🟡 YELLOW: There are some problems that need to be solved. However, it’s not a disaster.
• 🔴 RED: A lot is going wrong. Improvements are urgently needed.

In addition, the teams indicate which trend they see with an arrow on the respective traffic light color. Compared to the last Health Check, has the indicator improved, worsened or remained the same?

• ↗️ Up arrow: Improvements are visible.
• ↘️ Down arrow: Things are getting worse.
• ➡️ Straight ahead / no arrow: Things are consistently the same.

The following image from Spotify gives a nice overview of what such a health check might look like: Spotify Squad Health Check.

What does this mean for each indicator? What does good and bad mean for each dimension? To guide your team for its assessment, the Spotify Agile Team Health Check has specific behavioral anchors, these in turn can be found on the so-called: Spotify Health Check Cards.

You can download the Spotify Health Check Cards as a PDF below at the push of a button. Alternatively, they are available directly as a download here:

• Spotify Health Check Cards (German, PDF)

Moderating the Spotify Squad Health Check - Helpful food for thought for moderation

The Spotify Health Check is, of course, not just about generating a pretty picture. Rather, the resulting graphic should be a basis for in-depth discussions, reflections and improvement measures.

To ensure that the result discussion of the Spotify Health Check is successful, we have compiled individual food for thought for each dimension here:

Spotify Health Check Moderation Tips

With these thought-provoking ideas, you should already be able to stimulate good discussions. The following video is a very concrete tutorial from me on how the Spotify Health Check can be carried out free of charge.

I warmly recommend that you watch it next for a better overview:

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Implementation: How does a Spotify Health Check work?

Spotify Health Check: Online vs offline?

Essentially, the Spotify Health Check works better offline than online. Discussions are more lively and productive face-to-face - they are the most valuable part of the Spotify Labs Team Health Check. This is due to the fact that when your team or squad is discussing, they gain important insights into what they can improve on. Furthermore, as Servant Leader, you’ll learn how to efficiently support your team to make faster progress.

However, the Spotify Health Check Model also works online. Especially in experienced teams who have a Remote-Arbeitskultur can also easily use the Spotify Health Check on a whiteboard tool or online retrospective tool such as Echometer.

Overall, you should plan 60 to 120 minutes for the Spotify Health Check Model – depending on the team size.

Implementation as an On-Site Workshop

You can carry out the Spotify Health Check on-site in these three steps:

• 1. Distribute Spotify Health Check Cards: Firstly, to keep your team in mind and check, you give them the Spotify Health Check Cards. These will show exactly how they evaluate each indicator. This way, they can orient themselves on how they feel for each factor. Then the team can give a more concrete rating; helping to further assess the current status of the project and the cooperation within the team.

• 2. Evaluate indicators: You go through each Spotify Health Check Card with your team. To do this, you read each card out loud once, including the two examples for “good” and “bad”. You then ask the participants for their assessment: green, yellow or red? And: What is the trend of the color? The team or squad can and should discuss each indicator before giving a rating. Because: Already during the discussion you can gain important insights into where you can work together to make improvements. Your employees will not always agree on the assessment. This is perfectly normal. In order to get a tendency and record it within the Spotify Health Check, you can, for example, vote with points. Each team member has one vote on whether they rate an indicator as positive, neutral or negative. In the end, you take the assessment with the most votes. However, you can also find other ways that suit your team and project to define an assessment.

• 3. Record evaluations: Record each evaluation in writing in order to get a clear picture of how you can positively influence your collaboration and the progress of the project. It is also noteworthy to directly jot down initial ideas and suggestions for improvement. This will save you a lot of work in the end.

Spotify Squad Health Check Online Implementation

If you want to carry out the Spotify Squad Health Check online, you can use a survey tool and an online whiteboard tool / retro tool – or simply use Echometer, which combines both.

If you would like to take a look at various tools, here are some of the Spotify Health Check Online Tools: Retro Tool Comparison .

We explain exactly how the implementation works online and with an asynchronous preliminary survey here: Spotify Health Check Retrospectives

What you need to consider during the Spotify Health Check - 7 Tips

To get the most out of your Spotify Health Check, pay attention to these points:

1. Customize the Spotify Health Check.

Every team is different. Therefore, adapt the Spotify Health Check Cards to your way of working instead of adopting the template 1:1. In this way, you clarify which collaboration you want to promote and what expectations your team has of you.

2. Develop your Health Check over time

Keep the variety of questions high so that different perspectives are included. View the dimensions only as a starting point and let the team delete or add questions if they don’t fit.

3. Don’t ask too many questions

Too many questions dilute the picture and prevent detailed discussions. Don’t use all dimensions for every workshop, for example, only rotate currently relevant dimensions into your regular retrospectives.

4. Formulate preventively and ask for perception

Formulate questions in such a way that they reflect the collaboration in the team environment and leave room for subjective assessments and emotions. Avoid hard metrics like velocity so that it remains clear: it’s not about performance evaluation.

5. Realize that this is subjective data

Evaluations are subjective moods, not hard KPIs . Question together why a point is seen optimistically or critically before deriving measures.

6. Be careful with comparisons

Comparisons between teams are rarely fair because each group evaluates differently. Use them at most to identify common problem areas, not for rankings.

7. Do not use the Spotify Health Check as an assessment tool for management

The Spotify Scrum Health Check is intended to provide honest feedback, not to serve management scorecards. Do not share results outside the team without coordination (Vegas rule) so that everyone remains open and no performance anxiety arises.

Conclusion: Spotify Health Check as an effective workshop format for teams

The Spotify Health Check reveals problems and potentials within your team and project – and early on, before your other KPIs are affected. Especially as a workshop format, the Spotify Health Check helps you to communicate expectations, reflect on collaboration in a differentiated way, and develop effective measures.

As a tool for management reporting, the Spotify Health Check can even be harmful. However, this also applies to other agile metrics in general. By the way, you can find information on other agile metrics and the question of which might be the best agile metric answered in this article: Agile KPI’s .

We have had the best experiences reflecting on individual dimensions regularly in our team retrospectives. We have also written an article on this that I would recommend to all agile teams: Spotify Health Check Retrospective . If you are still looking for a suitable retro board (with 60+ retro methods), our article can help you with the topic: Sprint Retro board free: Comparing the 7 best retro boards or 22 Refreshing Agile Retrospective Templates in 2026

Frequently asked questions about the Spotify Health Check

Spotify Team Health Check vs Squad Health Check?

There is a so-called Spotify model for agile collaboration. In this model, a squad is a cross-functional team.

Accordingly, “Spotify Team Health Check” and “Spotify Team Health Check” are to be used synonymously.

We have described here in a compact way how Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds interact: Agiles Spotify Modell .

Of course, you can also perform the Spotify Squad Health Check across teams. When one discusses different “ scaled levels ” or hierarchies with scaled agile frameworks, one often uses the Scaled Agile Framework: SAFe or similar models . The Spotify Health Check is also often used in the context of SAFe & Co.

Spotify Health Check as a Retrospective

With the Spotify Health Check, the evaluation of the work done so far reveals what has gone well and what has gone badly. In the context of agile work, this is generally referred to as Retrospective .

And: It shows why certain things went well or badly. This also reveals where you can start with your team to lead a project to success more efficiently and make your employees more satisfied by actively involving them and their perspectives.

In other words, the Spotify Health Check Retrospective ensures that your project and your team are healthy. It is a tool to make the autonomy, culture, and continuous learning within a team measurable and to strengthen them.

Here are the Spotify Health Check indicators sorted by topic, including open reflection questions if you are planning a workshop or a Spotify Health Check retrospective.

We have developed 4 different Spotify Health Check retrospectives from the behavioral anchors. You can now open them in our retro tool without logging in - feel free to take a look:

Is the Spotify Health Check Model always suitable?

The Spotify Health Check is suitable for these kinds of groups:

1. Teams: By discussing the individual indicators of the Spotify Health Check Retro, a team learns what works for them as a unit - and what doesn’t. It helps members understand what determines their progress and satisfaction within the group. In this way, they can, for example, adjust work rhythms, distribute tasks differently, or reset priorities.
2. “Teams of Teams”: If cross-team areas adopt the Spotify Health Check, the individual teams will better understand how other teams work and what problems they have. In this way, they gain a new perspective on their way of working and how they can approach tasks mentally and practically. In addition, teams can give each other tips and the exchange of knowledge is promoted!
3. Employees who support a team or squad: Release Train Engineers, Scrum Master and Agile Coaches, who do not work directly in the team or squad, but support them, receive an overview of their status quo via the Spotify Health Check. They learn where they can better support their teams so that they work more efficiently and are more satisfied. For example, they can uncover patterns between different teams and derive important insights from them. In other words, the Spotify Health Check helps you to identify who you need to change what with in order to make teams, squads and projects work more smoothly.

By the way, this is exactly what our tool Echometer does, enabling a constant agile health check in combination with retrospectives (also in scaled agile environments) - e.g. in companies like Miele and T-Systems.

How does a Spotify Health Check benefit your team?

A Spotify Team Health Check brings you and your team these benefits:

• Awareness of the status quo: You facilitate and provoke valuable discussions within your team to uncover challenges and potentials - for the project, for the team, and for you as a Servant Leader.
• Qualitative discussions: You facilitate and provoke valuable discussions within your team to uncover challenges and potentials - for the project, for the team, and for you as a Servant Leader.
• Development of improvement measures: You can develop actions based on the gained insights to improve collaboration, project results and work atmosphere.
• Communication of desired behaviors: The results of the Spotify Health Check tool reveal what team members want from you as a servant leader for factors such as communication, collaboration, feedback, professional support, leadership and trust.