How we deliver, in the FAQ

Running delivery day to day, answered in full.

The week-to-week practice: managing product delivery, watching a release in production, and keeping the team well enough to do it again next quarter. Written for the person running a quarter rather than for a buyer, and free to use with us or without us.
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54 questions on running delivery day to day, answered by Tenhaw, a UK AI consultancy and AI delivery partner based in London. Nothing here is a summary: each answer is the exact text from the page that owns it, and every group links back to that page for the context around it.

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18 questions

How to monitor the first week after a release

Answered on How to monitor the first week after a release, and rendered here in the same words.

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How long should the window be?

Seven days by default, because it covers a full weekly cycle including the weekend and is short enough that people remember it is open. Shorten it only for changes with no customer-visible surface. A billing change needs the window to reach the next run, and a seasonal feature needs it to reach the first real peak, so extend it only with a reason and a new closing date written in the ticket. A window with no end date is not monitoring, it is a browser tab left open.

Is this the same as being on call?

No, and running them as one job is why post-release problems get missed. On call reacts to things that alert. Live monitoring goes looking for the things that do not: a journey that quietly completes at 54% instead of 61%, a support tag creeping up, a new error signature at ten a day. On call can hold the pager for the release, but somebody has to own the fixed-rhythm checks, the FAQ entry and the recorded decision, and that is a different piece of work. Tenhaw keeps the two apart, with the watch named on the ticket and one senior lead holding it for the window rather than a rota, under partner oversight from James Rooney.

What if the change is behind a flag or a percentage rollout?

The window opens at first real user exposure, not at deploy, and your thresholds apply to the exposed cohort rather than to total traffic. A 2% error rate inside a 5% rollout is invisible in the overall number and is still the reason to stop. Write the ramp steps into the ticket with the check you run before each one, and treat turning the flag off as the cheap rollback it is, rather than waiting to pull the whole release.

Who owns it, product or engineering?

One named person on the ticket, whichever function they sit in, with a named deputy. Where Tenhaw carries that name it is on a Programme and Delivery Management engagement, and one person holds it rather than a rota. In practice the product manager tends to own the customer impact numbers, the FAQ entry and the macro, and the engineer who shipped the change tends to own the error and latency checks. Split the checklist between them if you like, but only one name carries the decision, and that person needs standing authority to roll back without convening a meeting.

Why does a release work in staging but break in production?

Because production carries the things staging cannot rehearse: real accounts, real devices, a misconfigured flag, a missing environment variable, a CDN still serving last week's assets. That is why the first check is a person walking every key journey on production within the first hour, on the devices your users actually have, with a fresh account and a cold cache, because your own browser holds the flags and cookies that hide the fault. Watch the segments too. A fault confined to one browser, one region or one enterprise tenant disappears into a 99.6% overall success rate, so split every headline number by platform and by customer segment in the first four hours.

How often should you check on a release after it goes live?

On a fixed rhythm, not on anxiety: one hour, four hours, 24 hours, then once a day until the monitoring window closes. Put the checklist in the ticket so a deputy runs exactly the same one: the numbers against the written baseline, new error signatures rather than raw volume, and support contacts on the tag. One new signature at low volume matters more than a familiar one at high volume. Post every result in the same channel, including when everything is flat, because a flat check posted publicly is what tells everyone the change is holding. Each check takes minutes, and if the release lands on a Friday, move it or accept that you have chosen to staff the weekend.

What should you baseline before a release goes out?

Record, before the deploy, the numbers you expect afterwards with today's value beside each: error rate on the affected endpoints, p95 latency, completion rate for every journey the ticket names, support contacts on the tag, and any business counter the epic is meant to move. Take the baseline from the same weekday and hour you will compare against, so Tuesday lunchtime is judged against Tuesday lunchtime. Paste the saved query or dashboard link beside each number, so the person running the four-hour check is not inventing one under pressure. Without a written prediction you will talk yourself into calling a regression seasonal variation.

When should you roll back a release instead of fixing forward?

When it crosses a threshold you wrote down before the release, not one negotiated during the incident. Roll back, for example, if the checkout error rate stays above 1% for two hours, or if any named journey fails outright for more than 10% of sessions. Watch, with a named fix, an owner and a date, when the movement is bounded and a fix is in reach the same day. One named person makes the call and can roll back without convening anyone. Weigh a day of bounded impact, in currency, against the planned value of the epic you would pull. If you fix forward, raise the bug anyway, because a hot fix off the ticket hides your quality signal.

How do you prepare customer support for a release?

Write the answer once, correctly, and early, before the first customer hits the problem and someone in support has to improvise under time pressure. For each issue found in the first week, record who is affected and how many in numbers not adjectives, such as roughly 3% of sessions or about 40 orders a day. Publish the FAQ entry in the words a customer would search for, not the words the ticket uses. Give support a macro that names the workaround and says whether a fix is coming, then have them send it live once and confirm it closed the contact without escalating. The cost of an unsupported release is paid by second line.

Can an AI agent run post-release monitoring?

It can run most of it, and it should. Let an agent run the fixed-rhythm checks, diff the numbers against the written baseline, cluster new error signatures and draft the FAQ entry and the support macro. Two things stay with a person, the journey walk on production with a real account and the continue, watch or rollback decision, which needs a named owner with standing authority to act. Tenhaw builds these agents for clients against an open-source standard of 72 rules. A model reporting that the release is healthy is evidence about the build, not the live system, and a journey that fails before it emits anything looks identical to a journey nobody used. Automate the checking, keep the judgement.

We had no alerts after the release. Is that a good sign?

Not on its own. Silence often means the new path was never instrumented, and a journey that breaks before it emits anything looks exactly like a journey nobody used. Confirm the new code is producing signal before you decide it is producing good signal, by finding the first real event from the new path and comparing its volume with the completion rate you recorded before the deploy. Dashboards tell you what broke, not that the thing works, so the check that settles it is a person walking the journeys the ticket named on production, with a real account and the devices your users actually have. Treating silence as success is how a bad release survives its first day.

What do you do with the problems you find in the first week?

Bucket every one of them before the window closes, because nothing found in live monitoring is allowed to float. A defect in shipped behaviour is a bug. Raise it and link it to the quarter's Bug Budget epic, including the one you already hot-fixed, since a fix pushed without a ticket flatters the board and wrecks the burn rate that tells you whether quality is improving or rotting. A shortcut taken to stabilise the release is tech debt, linked to the quarter's Tech Debt epic. Something the change was meant to do and never did is a missed requirement, so it becomes a story or an outcome ticket rather than a bug.

How much extra work does watching a release actually add?

Less than teams expect, and most of it lands before the deploy. Naming the owner and the deputy, writing the baseline numbers with a saved query beside each, and agreeing the rollback thresholds all happen while nothing is on fire, and that preparation is what makes the rest cheap. Tenhaw runs the watch with the same two or three senior people who shipped the change. The checks then run on the fixed one, four and 24-hour rhythm and should take minutes each: the numbers against the written baseline, new error signatures, support contacts on the tag. The real effort sits in the journey walk on production in the first hour, and in writing the customer FAQ entry and the support macro properly.

What does a release watch look like when something goes wrong?

It looks like a rule firing rather than an argument. The worked example here, an invented retailer with invented numbers, ships a guest checkout epic on a Tuesday at 13:00 against a written baseline of 0.4% checkout error rate, 910ms p95 latency and 61.5% completion. The one-hour check finds all four named journeys passing on real devices, but a 1.9% error rate concentrated in one browser's address-lookup fallback. The agreed threshold needs two hours above 1%, so 14:20 is recorded as watch with a re-check booked for 16:20. Still 1.7%, so at 16:35 the flag goes back to the previous provider, a partial rollback rather than pulling the epic, and it is 0.6% by 17:00.

We ship without any of this today. What is the first thing to add?

Three lines in the ticket of your next release, all written before the deploy. Tenhaw publishes all seventeen guides free to adopt. One: a named owner, a named deputy and the date the window closes, seven days out by default. Two: the numbers you expect afterwards with today's baseline and the saved query beside each, taken from the same weekday and hour you will compare against. Three: the threshold that would trigger a rollback, and who can call it without convening anyone. That alone catches most of what teams miss. Add the fixed-rhythm checks on the release after that, then the customer FAQ entry and the support macro. One release watched properly teaches a team more than a process document ever will.

Do we need new monitoring tools to watch a release?

Almost certainly not. Tenhaw runs this watch on a client's existing dashboards. The kit is the dashboards and saved queries you already have, named and linked in the ship kit so the person running the four-hour check is not inventing a query under pressure. What teams actually lack is simpler, a real production account rather than a seeded one for walking the journeys, and the devices your users have rather than the laptop the change was built on. Log in clean, with nothing cached, because the browser you have been developing in will hide the fault. If a number genuinely is not visible, the gap is usually instrumentation on the new code path, not your tooling budget.

What has to be true before you can call a release done?

In The Tenhaw Way, five things, all evidenced on the ticket. Every key journey the shipped ticket named has been walked on production by a person, with the screenshots stored against the ticket. A continue, watch or rollback decision is recorded with its timestamp, its owner and the numbers it rested on. Every defect found is linked to the quarter's Bug Budget epic and every stabilising shortcut to the Tech Debt epic. The customer FAQ entry and the support macro are published and have answered a real contact without escalating. Then the window closes with a written note, and the parent epic moves into value monitoring or is held with a stated reason and a date.

Who covers the release watch at the weekend or on holiday?

A deputy named in the ticket when the release is scheduled, not found on the day. Tenhaw names the deputy alongside the owner. Seven days is the default window precisely because it covers a full weekly cycle including the weekend, so cover is a planning question rather than an emergency. The deputy works from the same written baseline, the same thresholds and the same channel as the owner, which is why all of that goes into the ticket before the deploy rather than into someone's head. Hand over the open items too: what sits on watch, when the next re-check falls, and who can be woken. If nobody can cover the window, move the release rather than hoping the days off stay quiet.

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18 questions

How to run product delivery day to day

Answered on How to run product delivery day to day, and rendered here in the same words.

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How long should this take each day?

Twenty to thirty minutes of passes, plus one forty-five minute decision window. Roughly ten minutes on the board and routing, ten on the approval queue, five on the close. If it reliably takes more, diagnose which part is swelling. A long morning pass means a stale board. A long approval queue means you are batching approvals that should clear daily, or tickets are arriving too thin to approve at all.

What if I cover three teams?

One sequence per team, one pass covering all three, one shared decision window. The part that does not scale is the approval queue, because you are the constraint on it. If clearing it takes more than about forty-five minutes a day, delegate product approval to a named person per team with the gate rules unchanged, rather than approving faster and looking less closely. Tenhaw's founder James Rooney worked that delegation problem at scale in a role inside HSBC Global Payment Solutions, co-leading a target operating model for 500 teams and a $450M portfolio, piloted and due for global rollout in 2026.

An urgent customer request just came in. Does it beat the sequence?

A live production incident does, and it goes into the RAID log as an issue rather than being quietly slotted into the roadmap. Everything else waits for your next sequencing pass. If it does beat the current next item, say out loud what it displaces and where that work now lands, because unnamed displacement is how a quarter goes missing.

How is this different from stand-up?

Stand-up belongs to the team and covers what they are doing. This is your own loop, and most of it happens before stand-up so you arrive with decisions rather than questions. If you need stand-up to find out the state of the board, the board is the problem, and fixing that will save you more time than any change to the meeting.

How do I stop spending my whole day answering status questions?

Make the board answer them. Tenhaw ran that move at Globelynx, where operational data was collated continuously into trends leadership could act on rather than assembled into a report whenever somebody asked, and delivery lead times fell 60% within six months. If people ask you instead of reading it, you have accepted a job that scales to about six people and then collapses. Answer once with a link to the item, then fix whatever made the link useless: a stale state, a missing comment, a decision that happened in chat and never landed on the ticket. Your morning pass exists to keep the board carrying the truth, so anyone can self-serve the state of any epic without you.

How do I spot stalled work on a delivery board?

Look for anything with no state change and no comment for two working days, then name it and act on it the same day. That check sits in the morning pass, alongside work in progress against each team's limit, the Ready for Dev queue and bug budget burn. Silence usually traces back to a question blocking the build that never got an answer, a ticket approved too thin, or a decision made in chat that never reached the board. Find which one it is, then answer the question, fix the ticket, or bring the record back onto the board. And if the pass takes forty minutes, the board is stale, and fixing it is item one.

How fast should a product manager answer questions that block a build?

Within four working hours, either with an answer or with a written assumption on the ticket. Hold one fixed forty-five minute window in the middle of the day, publish it, and let anything that is not blocking wait for refinement. The written assumption is the important half. Record what you assumed, who owns it, and what you would change if it turns out wrong, because a guess is safe once it is written down and owned. Watch the pattern too. Repeated blocking questions on one epic mean the ticket was approved too thin, so the durable fix is the ticket, not faster answers.

How often should a team's priority order actually change?

Confirm it daily, change it rarely. Each team gets exactly one visible prioritised order with a single item marked next, set or confirmed once a day in the same pass. Only three things earn a resequence: a validation result, a slip that changes what can land, or a dependency arriving early or late. A message from a loud stakeholder is not one of them. An order that changes every morning is not a sequence, it is a mood, and it costs the switch, the re-plan, and a team that has stopped believing the order means anything.

What should happen to an epic's value when it loses scope mid-quarter?

The planned value moves the same day, and you move it, rather than leaving it for the monthly outcome validation to discover. Tenhaw holds its own retainers to that standard, reporting a month that delivers no measurable value as a failed month. If a £240k epic loses the half of its scope that carried most of the value, it is a £150k epic now and its outcome is £90k short. Write the new number on the epic, let the gap show on the outcome, and add one line naming the option you would take: a new epic, a scope trade, or a lower target agreed openly. With eight weeks of quarter left that gap is actionable. Found in week thirteen, it is a postmortem.

A developer is free. Should I rush the next epic through approval?

No. An idle developer is the exact pressure the approval gate exists to resist. An epic waved through without product approval, engineering approval and at least one product-approved story buys two days of activity and pays for it with a rebuild. Tenhaw does not trust memory to hold rules under that pressure either, which is why its engineering handbook carries 72 numbered rules written to be enforced by an agent. The honest fix is queue speed, not gate removal. Work the approval queue every day, in sequence order rather than arrival order, and approve or reject inside one working day, with any rejection naming the missing artefact. Run that way, the gate rarely leaves anyone idle for long, and the short wait is cheaper than the rework.

Isn't checking the board every morning just micromanagement?

No, because the pass is over the board, not over the people. Tenhaw spent six months on that job at Greggs, Scrum Master support across the Mobile App and Integration squads plus agile coaching beyond engineering. It takes five to ten minutes and checks four things: work in progress against each team's limit, anything with no state change or comment for two working days, the Ready for Dev queue, and bug budget burn. You are not asking anyone how their day is going. You are collecting the two or three items only you can act on, clearing the approvals that are yours, and getting out of the way. Micromanagement is telling people how to do the work. This is deciding what order it happens in.

What do you actually need to run delivery day to day?

Two artefacts carry most of it, a delivery board that holds the truth, and the quarter's p50 and p85 forecast range. Around those, four rules agreed in advance. A work in progress limit per team. One visible prioritised order per team, with a single item marked next. A planned currency value on every epic, because that is the number the quarter is measured on and no epic should be approved with it blank. And gate rules everyone knows, so an epic cannot leave Ready for Dev without product approval, engineering approval and at least one product-approved story attached. None of it is proprietary, and Tenhaw publishes the method in full, free for anyone to adopt. Everything else in the routine is habit rather than kit.

What should I do first when a team is over its work in progress limit?

Stop starting before you start chasing. Pushing on every item at once feels like management, but attention does not add capacity and the queue only shortens when work leaves it, so the first move is to start nothing new and finish something. Take the item closest to done and clear whatever it is holding: an approval sitting in your own queue, a question blocking the build, a review nobody picked up. The breach itself should be visible the same day, because work in progress against the limit is the first thing the morning pass checks, ahead of stalled items, the Ready for Dev queue and bug budget burn.

Two pieces of work look equally important. Which one goes first?

Take the one attached to the outcome furthest from its currency target, because that is where the missing value sits. Urgency and volume are the tie-breakers most teams reach for, and the least informative, because two items can both be genuinely pressing while only one of them closes a gap on the number the quarter is measured against. Each team carries exactly one prioritised order with a single item marked next, so the tie gets broken somewhere visible rather than in a private judgement call. Put the choice on the board as the order, not in your head, or you will re-explain it every morning.

How do we stop delivery decisions getting lost in chat?

Land every decision on the ticket in the hour it is made. The familiar failure is that something real gets decided in a thread and the ticket is never touched, so the decision was real but the trail is not, and three weeks later nobody can say why the scope moved or who owned the assumption. Hold one published decision window in the middle of the day, forty-five minutes, then write each call onto the item it affects the same hour, with any assumption named and owned. Chat is fine for reaching a decision. It is not a record, because nobody reads a thread back, and the board is what everyone else self-serves from.

Does every new item really need to sit under an epic?

Yes, and routing them takes about ten minutes a day. A bug found this quarter links to the Bug Budget epic, debt raised during the build links to the Tech Debt epic, risks and issues go to the RAID log with a named owner, and every epic sits under an outcome. The Tenhaw Way is blunt about the rest. Anything that cannot name a parent does not start today. It reads like bureaucracy until you see that it buys burn rates that stay meaningful all quarter, and an honest answer when someone asks where the capacity went. Route in the morning pass, not at the end of the week when nobody remembers half the items.

Why does one stuck ticket hurt more when the model writes the code?

Because the board carries fewer, larger items. In an AI-native team there are no stories, so your approval queue is epic-level outcome tickets and you approve the currency share, the key user journeys and the test requirements rather than acceptance criteria. One of those stalling is a far bigger share of the quarter than a stalled story ever was, so a two-day stall matters more, not less, and it gets named the morning it shows. Tenhaw sets that operating model up with a delivery team of two or three rather than twenty. A model reporting completion is a claim, not evidence, so done costs more attention too, with someone named watching the tests pass and the journeys demonstrated in front of a person.

What should a delivery lead check at the end of each day?

Five minutes, comparing where the work sits against your p50 and p85 forecast range rather than a single invented date. Anything that has fallen outside p85 for landing inside the quarter gets said today, to the person who has to make the choice, with the three options attached: cut scope, move the epic to next quarter, or accept the risk. Do not soften it into an amber status with no ask, because that hands over the worry without handing over the decision. Tenhaw agrees the exit date at kickoff rather than negotiating it at the end. A slip raised in week four costs a conversation. The same slip raised in week twelve costs a commitment somebody else has already made to the business.

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18 questions

How to run a team health check

Answered on How to run a team health check, and rendered here in the same words.

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How is this different from a retrospective?

Different scope and different audience. Tenhaw installs both the retrospective and the monthly health check alongside client teams, as part of the operating model an Agentic Design Team designs at £35k to £55k a month. The retrospective runs fortnightly, belongs to the team, and works on the last two weeks, asking what happened and what to try next. The health check is monthly, scored, and read by management as well as the team, and it works on the system the team sits inside: line of sight, tech debt, defects, safety, pace. Run both. Fold the health check into the retro and the structural problems get traded away for the nearest process tweak, while management never sees the card.

Should the scores be anonymous?

Private until the reveal, not anonymous after it. Anonymous scores kill the only question worth asking, which is what did you specifically see that made you score it that way. Collect scores individually so nobody anchors, reveal them together, then discuss them attributed. If people will not put a red on the board with their name against it, that is your safety card answering itself, and it is a bigger finding than anything else in the session.

What if every card comes back green?

Assume a measurement problem before you assume a healthy team. Check three things: whether a manager scored or spoke first, whether the data agrees (forecast against actual, bug budget burn, epics bouncing out of Ready for Dev), and whether the wording is soft enough that agreeing costs nothing. A card everyone can agree with in a bad month is a badly worded card. Fix it at the annual re-word, not mid-year, and mark the break on the chart.

Who runs it and who attends?

The delivery lead owns and facilitates it, one team at a time: engineers, testers, designers, the product manager, and any contractor who has been there more than two weeks. Tenhaw supplies that facilitator on client teams at its published senior practitioner day rate of £1,250 excluding VAT, and hands the ritual to a client delivery lead before the engagement ends. Line managers of the people in the room do not attend, and no score is taken from anyone outside the team. If the delivery lead also line-manages half the room, borrow a facilitator from another team and have the lead abstain from scoring, because a score from the person who writes your review is not a score.

What questions should a team health check include?

Ten fixed statements covering line of sight to the outcome, value confidence, predictability, flow, work arriving ready, tech debt, defects, tooling, safety and pace. Word each as a statement a person can agree or disagree with, like "I know which outcome my current work rolls up to and what it is worth" or "I can change this codebase without fear". Then freeze the wording, because month three only means something if it is answering exactly the same question as month one. Ten cards, no additions, re-worded at most once a year with the break marked on the chart so nobody compares across it.

How often should you run a team health check?

Monthly, per team, in the same week every month, and alongside the fortnightly retrospective rather than instead of it. Tenhaw keeps that monthly beat with the client teams it works alongside. The session itself is forty-five minutes; the whole ritual costs about two hours a month once you include pulling the delivery data and publishing the card. Run an extra one as a baseline in your first fortnight with a new team, and again when a team changes how it delivers, treating the month after as a fresh start. Any single month is noise. Monthly matters because the instrument reads trends, and the signal only appears when the same cards line up across a quarter.

How should a team health check be scored?

Two marks per card, a colour for the current state and an arrow for direction. Green, amber and red are recorded as 2, 1 and 0, and the arrow comes from the team median against last month's median, which the team can overturn out loud with a reason. Everyone scores privately before any discussion, then everything is revealed at once, because if a senior person scores first every other number drifts towards theirs. The pair tells you more than either half alone, since amber-improving is a team already fixing something and green-worsening is the card worth an hour while it still looks fine.

What data should we bring to a team health check?

One page of the month's delivery data, circulated the day before so nobody meets it for the first time in the room: throughput, what the forecast said against what actually landed, bugs raised against the bug budget and closed, tech debt burn, how many pieces of work bounced back for missing approvals, and the validation result for every live outcome. The scores stay subjective and should, but half the cards have evidence in the tracker, and without it predictability and quality get scored on how last Tuesday felt. A team that missed its forecast by three epics can still score itself green in a week that happened to go well.

When should leadership act on a bad health check score?

On the trend, not the month. One red month is noise: somebody had a bad sprint, a release went sideways, half the team was on leave. The rule worth writing down is three consecutive months red or worsening, at which point the card stops being a retro item and becomes structural, with an owner at management level and a named change in the next quarter's roadmap. Not reacting early takes the same discipline. A reorg, a new process and a working group landing the month a score would have recovered on its own is the overreaction to resist, and holding that line when a director wants visible action is most of the work.

Should team health check results be shared with managers?

Yes, unedited and the same day. Management is half the card's audience, and the card exists to surface the obstacles the team cannot remove alone. Tenhaw does the same on client engagements, and reports a month that delivers no measurable value as a failed month. What makes that survivable is a protective rule, agreed in writing before the first session, that keeps the card out of an individual's performance review and out of a league table of teams, and stops anyone outside the team changing a number. Line managers do not sit in the session, but they see everything it produces, in full. The first time a red is quietly softened to amber on its way to a director, every score after it is decoration.

How do you keep a team health check to 45 minutes?

Stop trying to discuss all ten cards. Split the forty-five minutes: five on last month's actions, five on the reveal, thirty on six cards, five agreeing the new ones. Pick the six deliberately, taking the three with the widest spread across the team first, then the three that moved a step since last month. Five minutes a card, with the facilitator cutting it off, and everything else logged rather than debated. The cards you do not discuss still carry their colour and their arrow, so the chart stays complete and nothing is lost by leaving them alone this month.

Half the team scored green and half red. What does that mean?

The gap is the finding, and it usually means two groups are living in different parts of the system. That is why spread is the first thing you pick for discussion, ahead of the cards that simply look bad, because a card the whole team scores the same way is a shared view, while a split card is something one group can see and the other cannot. Ask what a person specifically saw that made them score it that way, rather than debating the number. In the worked example, product scored work arriving ready green and engineering scored it red, and the discussion surfaced that seven of eleven epics had left Ready for Dev with no approved story attached.

Why leave a health check with only two actions?

Because two actions that land beat ten that do not. Each of the two gets a named owner, a date inside the next month and a ticket in the normal tracker: tech debt goes on the quarter's Tech Debt epic, anything that changes the product becomes a story or an outcome ticket under a real epic, and anything the team cannot fix itself becomes a RAID entry owned by somebody outside the team. Nothing lives only in the health check document, because an action that is not in the tracker competes with committed epic work and loses. Open both at the start of the next session and mark them done or not done out loud.

Should new joiners score in a team health check?

Anyone who has been on the team less than two weeks abstains, and says so out loud rather than guessing at a system they have not seen yet. Several abstentions after a fortnight tell you something about onboarding before a single card is scored, so treat them as a finding in their own right. Everyone else doing the work scores, engineers, testers, designers and the product manager included, because they each hit different failure modes. With a genuinely new team, run a session in the first fortnight anyway and treat it as the baseline rather than a verdict, then read the real signal from the months that follow.

Can we roll team health scores up into one number for the board?

Better not to. Tenhaw reports the cards to client boards, not an index, inside Programme and Delivery Management at £18k to £35k a month. Averaging them into an organisation-wide health percentage destroys the two properties that make the instrument useful, per team and per card, and it quietly rewards generous scoring, so the team marking itself most honestly looks worst. Report the cards as cards. If the board wants one line, give it the list of cards that have been red or worsening for three consecutive months, because those are the ones that already carry an owner at management level and a named change in the next quarter's roadmap. It is a shorter list than a percentage and somebody can actually act on it.

What do you do when the team cannot say what its work is worth?

Treat it as a line of sight failure and fix it at the epic rather than with a briefing. That card asks people to agree with a statement like "I know which outcome my current work rolls up to and what it is worth", and a red on it is common in a first month. In the worked example, four of nine people scored it zero and all four were developers. The product manager put the outcome name and its share of the currency target at the top of every epic, a small and structural action. The card came back amber and improving the next month, and green in month three.

Which health check cards change for an AI-native team?

The instrument stays the same and three cards change wording. Work arriving ready is scored on the outcome ticket instead of an attached story, because stories and chapters do not exist in that mode. Ask whether the ticket carries the outcome's currency share, the key user journeys and the test requirements, or whether you are filling the gaps by guessing. Swap the codebase-fear card for a verification card, "I can tell whether what the model produced works, not just that it ran", since that is where AI-native teams fail quietly. Predictability and value confidence stay exactly as written. When a team changes mode, re-word once, mark the break on the chart and treat the next month as a fresh baseline.

How do health check scores feed into quarterly planning?

At quarterly roadmap close, put the quarter's three cards side by side and read them next to the Tech Debt and Bug Budget epics you are closing out, because the scores and the burn explain each other. A card that has been red or worsening all three months earns a line in next quarter's plan, a named change owned above the team rather than another retro action. In the worked example, quality was red for the third month running by the end of the quarter, so the plan carried the bug budget cut from 40 to 25 with a named defect triage owner, instead of a fourth conversation about testing more.

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