- A story a day keeps the cynics away—here’s today’s.
Why Joy is a Delivery Metric.
Harvard Business Review’s “Happiness Dividend” study showed happy employees are 31% more productive and 37% better at sales. Agile doctrine emphasizes “people over process,” yet most teams still focus on burndowns and defect counts, metrics that punish rather than inspire. Our Joy-Flow radar flips the script: plot throughput and team mood on the same axes, make joy as visible as velocity, and you finally manage what really multiplies value.
From the Field.
A global pharma-tech team shipping tele-consult features has hit a plateau—releasing every 18 days, with an eNPS of around zero. No attrition, no excitement. We introduced the Joy-Flow radar (a main Agile Q2 experiment):
- Flow axis: average story cycle time per sprint.
- Joy axis: weekly anonymous emoji poll (😊 😐 😢) converted to a 10-point score.
- Radar shading: larger area = healthier sprint.
The team focused on the radar instead of the burndown at every review. Two key insights emerged quickly: joy dropped whenever code review queues increased, and joy rose after cross-team kudos sessions. They limited WIP in review, kept the kudos wall active, and saw a decrease in cycle time. After six sprints, the release cadence improved to every 12 days (+30%), eNPS increased by 18 points, and post-release defects decreased by 15%. Cynics became convinced; the radar secured a permanent spot on the exec dashboard.
Recreate the Radar.
- Poll joy: add a three-emoji Slack poll every Friday: poll "How was this sprint?" 😊 😐 😢.
- Export flow: pull Jira cycleTimeInDays per sprint.
- Plot: feed both numbers into our free joy_flow.py snippet; paste the SVG into Confluence.
Early signal you’re on track: radar area stops yo-yoing, then expands sprint over sprint. When joy dips, the trigger is obvious—review queues, after-hours spikes, or meeting overload, so the fix is surgical, not speculative.
Share Your Wins.
Community Roundup: Did an empathy ritual reduce rework? Did a five-second pause prevent a flame war? Drop your story on the net or tag #AgileWithHeart on LinkedIn. We’ll compile the best stories into a roundup post (and yes, we’ll credit your team).
Real tales beat slide decks every time.