What are the similarities and differences between Agile Squads and Super7 teams?

Many traditional companies are adopting an Agile way of working, inspired by innovative companies like Spotify, Zappos or Google. In financial services there is also inspiration from within: the transition from classical operational management towards Super7 Operations.

 Similarities Agile Squads and Super7 teams

• Small team of 5 to 9 members
• High degree of autonomy
• Steered on output
• Team has one mission, one common goal
• Workload and progress is made visual
• High degree of flexibility in skills and capacity

Differences Agile Squads and Super7 teams

• Super7 Operations for ‘customer requests’: operational work, at least in part repetitive
• Agile Squads for ‘customer missions’: customer services or enablers involving any combination of product development, marketing, product management, data management and IT
• Super7’s have daily goals (e.g. TITO): daily processing of all customer requests for that day
• Agile Squads work in weekly sprints, weekly releases of customer-ready solutions or improvements

My conclusion is that both Super7 teams and Agile Squad are manifestations of the same Lean principles. For example, both apply visual management, flexible resources (capacity and skills) and customer centricity.  I expect that the Agile trend delivers the same break-through results in product development and product management as the Super7 trend has delivered in operations.

Menno R. van Dijk