Trade-Off Sliders
Establishing healthy communication is vital to a well-functioning, productive team that finds joy and fulfillment in their work, building basic trust and creating back-and-forth collaboration is the focus of many of these team norming activities.
The sliders exercise allows various team members to express their most and least negotiable parts of concepts and value drivers within a project. This means teams can identify and agree upon trade-offs more quickly as a project progresses and constraints are realized
Outcome
This helps us decide what the smallest slice of value looks like. More functionality with less flexibility? Etc. Having a conversation about these metrics will give us an understanding of effort vs. focus.
Method
- Brainstorm 6-8 items that you imagine might require trade-offs for the project or team (e.g. Flexibility vs. Maintainability)
- Give each team member a unique color code for their “slider”
- Team members take 5-10 minutes to decide where to put their slider for each trade-off item, keeping in mind that no 2 sliders can be in the same location for a given team member (e.g. Flexibility and Maintainability cannot both be ranked as the least negotiable item)
- Regroup and discuss willingness to trade-off various items, ensuring a common understanding across the team