Show HN: TeamDynamics, a “personality test” for teams

[ct___]

Hey HN! A few of us got together to build a tool to help teams understand, and improve, how they communicate and collaborate to get stuff done. It’s called TeamDynamics!

We’ve always found individual personality tests (MBTI, Enneagram, Big Five, etc.) useful for understanding our 1:1 interactions with others (even if not 100% scientific). But they don't capture the 1:N / N:1 / N:N dynamics that emerge when you mix a bunch of personalities together on a team.

Our hope is that TeamDynamics can fill that gap. It: [1] Gives the user a framework for understanding the “personality” of your team across the types of interactions that matter most in today’s work environment. [2] Offers suggestions for how you can get more done and have more fun while doing it — both as a group and as an individual — based on your team's personality.

The “single-player” experience is free to try all month at https://www.teamdynamics.io/start-solo?utm_source=hn&promoco... and we'd love to hear your thoughts! * Do the results of the test resonate with you? * Would you invite your team to take this (why or why not)? * Would this be helpful in defining team norms? Onboarding new hires? Coaching team members? Other use cases?

Thanks for giving it a look!

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P.S. We put a lot of this together with no-/low-code solutions, partly to check out how much that field has developed in just a few years. No surprise to the HN community I'm sure, but lots of really cool tools out there, and a few that we’re using here are (btw, if you have questions about any of these, or others you'd suggest, would love to hear them!): * [Forms + Payments] Tally — which we found right here on HN! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30258149 : Awesome, flexible form editor. Way better value than Typeform, Paperform, etc. * [Website] Webflow: Makes sense that they lead their category, and great community around it. Animations and forms are clunky, and needs more progress on logic. * [Integrations] Make (f/k/a Integromat): Way cheaper, and overall better, than Zapier. Could use a more robust community.

[chloexqi]

What are the personality types of teams? Did you design this for any type of company? Team size?

How do you account for the fact that individuals on the team can be really different from one another?

[ct___]

There are 16 different team types -- two "opposites" across four dimensions of team behaviors (2^4 combinations): how teams communicate information, how teams process information, how teams decide on what to do, and how teams work towards that goal. We should probably list them out somewhere on the website (good idea), but in the meantime you can get a sense for them here: https://www.teamdynamics.io/#dynamics

TeamDynamics is designed to be applicable for any team of "knowledge" workers, and organized around the group of people that do real work together. I.e., It's more applicable for the cross-functional growth team of 6-8 people (across product, design, engineering, etc.) than for, say, an entire 8-person product org (who don't really work together that much). TeamDynamics was built by people who build software products for their day jobs, so maybe inherently it's a bit biased in that direction?

Sweet spot on team size is up to 9 people; past that, probably worth breaking the group up into sub-teams to make sure the results actually reflect groups who work together every day.

The team personality result is an aggregate of the responses of all the individuals who take the test. However, we also ask each individual about their own personal preferences, so each person can see how their individual behavioral norms relate to their team's overall dynamics. In other words, you get both 1 result for the team's personality, and many individual results about how each team member relates to that personality.

[kjam___]

Nice work. Seems way more useful than those single-player mode tests like MBTI. Will give it a go with my team.

[ct___]

Thanks for the kind words! Let us know how it goes!