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Icebreaker activities


Got 5 minutes? Then you've got time to start making the personal connections that help us do our best work together. We hand-picked a few that build relationships as well as help move your work forward.

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Get to know the people you work with and let them get to know you.

Prime your brains for strategic planning, brainstorming, and problem-solving.

If you're struggling with team cohesiveness, or shared understanding on your Health Monitor, running this play might help.

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AND I NEED THIS... WHY?

There was a time when a team's strength was measured in terms of its output. Now, savvy leaders are realizing a team's strength comes from trust and belonging.

In this age of cross-functional agile teams, team membership changes depending on the project, with members filling a variety of job roles. This is also a Good Thing™. The catch is that fewer shared skills and experiences means it takes longer to build trust between teammates.

Building trust and belonging is a sound investment. Just be prepared to play the long game. Getting to know each other on a personal level can't be forced. It happens gradually through casual banter at our desks or before meetings, pick-up ball games at lunch, team dinners, etc. And, of course, by working together toward a common goal.

WHO SHOULD BE INVOLVED?

Your team, or whoever you've assembled for a meeting or offsite.

If key performance indicators (KPIs) feel too one-dimensional, try the Goals, Signals, and Measures play instead.
User Team
People

3 - 100

Measure Clock
Time

5 - 30 min

Difficulty Easy
Difficulty

Easy

Running the play

Pull these tricks out of your hat when you're waiting for people to trickle into a meeting, or at the beginning of an offsite centered on brainstorming and problem-solving. Have fun!

Materials

Whiteboard or butcher paper

Index cards

Markers

"Dicebreakers" print-out

SUPER QUICK ICEBREAKER QUESTIONS

Got a minute or two while people trickle into the meeting? Toss out a question and have a bit of fun.

QUESTIONS WITH PURPOSE

What will be the title of your autobiography?

  • Theme: Summarizing complex events or concepts
  • Purpose: Prepare for activities like crafting a vision statement.

What is your superhero name?

  • Theme: Naming stuff is hard!
  • Purpose: Practice packing a lot of info into a single, evocative word or phrase.

Who was your first mentor, and what qualities made them a good (or lousy) one?

  • Theme: Teamwork and support is important
  • Purpose: Reinforce the idea that relying on each other is a part of growth – good for projects or teams with lots of dependencies.

When did you call customer service to complain?

  • Theme: Empathizing with customers
  • Purpose: Remembering what it feels like to be on the customer side of a bad product or service puts us in a compassionate frame of mind before discussing trade-offs or designing a new user experience.

What is one thing you learned from a project that went wrong?

  • Theme: Failures are learning opportunities
  • Purpose: Focus on risk identification and mitigation.

"JUST FOR FUN" QUESTIONS

Print and assemble one of our icebreaker dice for a little extra fun, or just choose one of the questions below.

  • What animal would you choose to be, and why?
  • What is the last dream you remember?
  • How do you let teammates know you're in deep work mode?
  • Where would you vacation if money were no object?
  • Books, magazines, or podcasts?
  • What car did you learn to drive on?
  • What is one thing you're grateful for today?
  • When you read or watch TV, do you go for fiction or non-fiction?
  • Coffee, tea, or soda?
  • Can you remember a bumper sticker that made you smile?

FILL IN THE BLANKS

I have never ________________.

My friends love me for my ________________.

If my pet could talk, it would say ________________.

One ____________ is better than ten ________________.

ICEBREAKER ACTIVITIES FOR MEETINGS, OFFSITES, ETC.

Exorcise the Demons (10 min)

Best for groups of 3 or more. Use this activity to juice up your neuropathways before brainstorming or problem-solving, and have a few belly laughs.

  1. Introduce the topic you'll be brainstorming around, or the problem you'll be trying to solve.
  2. Using a whiteboard or butcher paper, ask the group to grab a marker and write down the worst ideas they can think of
  3. After a few minutes, step back and take 'em all in (we dare you not to bust up laughing!).
  4. (optional) Ask each person to share their favorite worst idea and why it stood out to them.

This exercise helps us resist the temptation to self-censor when the real problem solving begins. Because hey: you've already heard the worst ideas the group can come up with. Now that you've flushed them out of your system, you can proceed with your regularly-scheduled brainstorming.

Mystery Person Group Sort (15-30 min)

Best for groups of 20 or more. Use this activity to kickstart creative thinking and see different thought processes in action.

  1. Ask each person to write a surprising fact about themselves on an index card, and drop all the cards into a bag, box, or hat.
  2. Each person chooses a card at random.
  3. Now the fun begins. Stand up, mingle, and find cards that align to a theme or are of a type. Keep an open mind when thinking about what constitutes the common threads. It could be "daredevil tendencies", "origin stories", "music", or anything else. There is no limit to how big each grouping can be, but you must find groupings that accommodate all the cards.
  4. Have each group read their cards and share the theme they identified.
  5. (optional) Now, having heard the groupings chosen so far, invite the group to stand up and re-sort themselves. Some groupings will likely stay the same, while others will be dramatically different.

Notice how the point of the exercise was not to figure out which fact goes with which person? That's on purpose. In fact, remember to let participants know that at the beginning of the exercise in order to stave off any anxieties around it.

Telephone Charades (15 min)

Best for groups of 10 or more. Use this non-verbal activity to, oddly enough, warm up for a day of listening.

  1. Divide into teams of 5-8 people.
  2. Ask one team to come to the front of the room and stand in a line, all facing in the same direction (it's important that they can't see the person standing behind them).
  3. Show the person at the back of the line a word to act out silently, but don't have them do so just yet. Show it to the "audience" as well so they know what's up, but make sure nobody else in the line sees it.
  4. When the person at the back of the line is ready, they will tap the shoulder of the person standing in front of them. That person turns around so now the two are standing face to face (but again: the rest of the line continues facing forward).
  5. The person acting pantomimes the word as best they can. Do it 2 or 3 times so the person watching can really absorb and memorize the movements. But do not tell them the word being acted out!
  6. Now the person watching becomes the actor – they tap the person in front of them and repeat the pantomime as best they can. (You see where this is going, right?)
  7. Repeat steps 4-6 until everyone in the line has seen the pantomime.
  8. Laugh your arse off as the pantomime morphs dramatically from how the person at the back of the line originally acted out the word.
  9. If the person at the front of the line can correctly guess the word, that team scores a point.

Make sure each team gets a chance to act, and go until you cry "uncle". Looking for words to have the teams act out? Try these: mermaid, lawn sprinkler, firefighter, Gollum, light bulb, snow shovel, jet ski, surfer, walkie-talkie, frying pan.

Three Things (5-10 min)

Best for groups of 5 or more. Use this fast-paced activity to trigger quick, unfiltered thinking before a brainstorming session.

  1. Circle up and choose a person to kick things off – we'll call them Person A.
  2. Person A turns to the person next to them (Person B) and names a category – e.g., "types of sandwiches".
  3. Person B rattles off 3 things that fit into that category as fast as they can. No judgement and no self-censoring!
  4. When they're done, the entire group give a clap and yells "Three things!"
  5. Go around the circle until everyone has had a chance to name the category and name the three things.

The point isn't to make sure all things named fit the category perfectly, or to come up with the wittiest response. Just let your brains relax so your neurons can fire quickly. Celebrate even the oddest contributions and set an anything-goes tone before diving into more cerebral, strategic activities.

Nailed it?

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

Variations

Game on

For more, check out this list of icebreaker games from our pals at Culture Amp.

Follow-ups

If you snapped pictures or grabbed video (especially of Telephone Charades), share them afterward. Try to resist getting a case of the giggles all over again – and good luck with that.

Related Plays

Rules of Engagement

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Thanks! Now get back to work.

Got feedback?

Drop a question or comment on the Atlassian Community site.

Developer Experience Survey

The Developer Experience Survey Play allows teams to understand precisely what’s holding their developers back and which improvements would yield the highest value for the team.

Clock icon
Run Time
30 mins
Connected people icon
People
3 or more
Developers filling out a survey about their experience

Developer Experience Survey

The Developer Experience Survey Play allows teams to understand precisely what’s holding their developers back and which improvements would yield the highest value for the team.

Developers filling out a survey about their experience
Stopwatch icon
Run Time
30 mins
Connected People icon
People
3 or more

Developer Experience Survey

The Developer Experience Survey Play allows teams to understand precisely what’s holding their developers back and which improvements would yield the highest value for the team.

Stopwatch icon
Run Time
30 mins
Connected people icon
People
3 or more
Developers filling out a survey about their experience

What you'll need

Remote
In-Person

Instructions for running this Play

Please note: The most useful developer experience surveys are organization-specific. In the following Play, we include an Atlassian-specific survey. Our survey may work for your team as-is, but we encourage you to adapt the survey to your team and organization as needed.

1. Select your vital signs 30 MIN

Have an extra minute or two? These thought-provoking questions make fantastic, fun icebreakers.

QUESTIONS WITH PURPOSE

To truly understand your team’s developer experience, you need to ask the right questions. At Atlassian, we focus our questions on key vital signs that help us uncover pain points within the developer experience. Vital signs are data points that act as team health and performance indicators. Much like your body’s vital signs, they can quickly identify problems in the system.

Vital signs are a crucial component to this entire Play, so before you begin, come to an agreement with your team about which vital signs are important to your operations. We recommend including six to eight vital signs in your own organization-specific survey.

Here are the eight vital signs that we created for our Atlassian developer experience survey:

  • Sustainable speed for shipping: How quickly your team ships high-quality code without developer burnout. This covers the typical development lifecycle from when the developers on your team begin to work on a user story to when a feature is deployed into production.
  • Waiting time: The amount of time the developers on your team spend waiting on builds, tests, code reviews, and unnecessary meetings.
  • Execution independence: Your team's ability to deliver without depending on other teams, regardless of who owns the code.
  • Ways of working: How much effort it takes to discover and onboard a new way of working that your team needs or would benefit from, including tools, frameworks, processes, or practices.
  • External standards: The work it takes to meet company standards. These standards are generated externally to your team and are in addition to product requirements like security and compliance.
  • Maintenance: The amount of time your team spends maintaining codebase, pipelines, and infrastructure. This work is generated internally by your team.
  • Onboarding: How quickly an engineer can become effective after being hired or transferring internally.
  • Developer satisfaction: How satisfied engineers are with their productivity.

Incorporate our vital signs into your organization-specific survey, or use ours for inspiration and create your own. If a vital sign doesn’t apply, you can remove it from the survey in step two. When in doubt about a vital sign’s relevance, we suggest leaving it in until you’ve run the Play at least once.

JUST-FOR-FUN QUESTIONS

To truly understand your team’s developer experience, you need to ask the right questions. At Atlassian, we focus our questions on key vital signs that help us uncover pain points within the developer experience. Vital signs are data points that act as team health and performance indicators. Much like your body’s vital signs, they can quickly identify problems in the system.

Vital signs are a crucial component to this entire Play, so before you begin, come to an agreement with your team about which vital signs are important to your operations. We recommend including six to eight vital signs in your own organization-specific survey.

Here are the eight vital signs that we created for our Atlassian developer experience survey:

  • Sustainable speed for shipping: How quickly your team ships high-quality code without developer burnout. This covers the typical development lifecycle from when the developers on your team begin to work on a user story to when a feature is deployed into production.
  • Waiting time: The amount of time the developers on your team spend waiting on builds, tests, code reviews, and unnecessary meetings.
  • Execution independence: Your team's ability to deliver without depending on other teams, regardless of who owns the code.
  • Ways of working: How much effort it takes to discover and onboard a new way of working that your team needs or would benefit from, including tools, frameworks, processes, or practices.
  • External standards: The work it takes to meet company standards. These standards are generated externally to your team and are in addition to product requirements like security and compliance.
  • Maintenance: The amount of time your team spends maintaining codebase, pipelines, and infrastructure. This work is generated internally by your team.
  • Onboarding: How quickly an engineer can become effective after being hired or transferring internally.
  • Developer satisfaction: How satisfied engineers are with their productivity.

Incorporate our vital signs into your organization-specific survey, or use ours for inspiration and create your own. If a vital sign doesn’t apply, you can remove it from the survey in step two. When in doubt about a vital sign’s relevance, we suggest leaving it in until you’ve run the Play at least once.

FILL IN THE BLANKS

To truly understand your team’s developer experience, you need to ask the right questions. At Atlassian, we focus our questions on key vital signs that help us uncover pain points within the developer experience. Vital signs are data points that act as team health and performance indicators. Much like your body’s vital signs, they can quickly identify problems in the system.

Vital signs are a crucial component to this entire Play, so before you begin, come to an agreement with your team about which vital signs are important to your operations. We recommend including six to eight vital signs in your own organization-specific survey.

Here are the eight vital signs that we created for our Atlassian developer experience survey:

  • Sustainable speed for shipping: How quickly your team ships high-quality code without developer burnout. This covers the typical development lifecycle from when the developers on your team begin to work on a user story to when a feature is deployed into production.
  • Waiting time: The amount of time the developers on your team spend waiting on builds, tests, code reviews, and unnecessary meetings.
  • Execution independence: Your team's ability to deliver without depending on other teams, regardless of who owns the code.
  • Ways of working: How much effort it takes to discover and onboard a new way of working that your team needs or would benefit from, including tools, frameworks, processes, or practices.
  • External standards: The work it takes to meet company standards. These standards are generated externally to your team and are in addition to product requirements like security and compliance.
  • Maintenance: The amount of time your team spends maintaining codebase, pipelines, and infrastructure. This work is generated internally by your team.
  • Onboarding: How quickly an engineer can become effective after being hired or transferring internally.
  • Developer satisfaction: How satisfied engineers are with their productivity.

Incorporate our vital signs into your organization-specific survey, or use ours for inspiration and create your own. If a vital sign doesn’t apply, you can remove it from the survey in step two. When in doubt about a vital sign’s relevance, we suggest leaving it in until you’ve run the Play at least once.

Curious how we created these vital signs?

First, we ran organization-wide surveys to gather data. Then, we applied the principles of outcome-driven innovation from Anthony Ulwick’s book, What Customers Want, to give each vital sign an opportunity score.

2. Run your survey 10 MIN

Loosen up and get engaged with these fun icebreakers for meetings. 

2. Run your survey 10 MIN

After you’ve chosen or created vital signs that apply to the developers on your team, invite all of your devs to complete your survey. Set a clear deadline — we recommend three to seven days.

If you’re unable to require everyone to complete the survey, you may want to capture additional details, such as role level or location. This helps ensure that your results aren’t skewed.

The following survey is based on Atlassian’s vital signs. If you choose to include different vital signs, you’ll need to adjust your survey questions. Ask two questions per vital sign: one about the importance of the vital sign to the developer, and one about how satisfied the developer is with their team’s current ability to deliver on the vital sign. Include a scale with your survey from 0 to 10, where 0 = not important/not satisfied and 10 = very important/very satisfied.

EXAMPLE SURVEY QUESTIONS TO GAGUE THE DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE:

Sustainable speed to ship

  • How important is shipping high-quality code sustainably for your team?
  • How satisfied are you with your team’s ability to ship high-quality code sustainably?

Waiting time

  • How important is minimizing waiting time to your productivity?
  • How satisfied are you with the amount of developer waiting time on your team?

Execution independence

  • How important do you consider your team's ability to deliver independently of other teams?
  • How satisfied are you with your team's delivery independence?

Ways of working

  • How important is it for your team to discover and onboard new ways of working, including tools, processes, and practices?
  • How satisfied are you with your team’s ability to discover and onboard a new way of working, including tools, processes, or practices?

External standards

  • How important to your productivity is the amount of maintenance or platform work it takes to meet the externally generated company standards your team owns?
  • How satisfied are you with the amount of maintenance or platform work it takes to meet the externally generated company standards your team owns?

Maintenance

  • How important to your productivity is the amount of effort required of you to maintain your team’s standards with regard to code, tools, and pipelines?
  • How satisfied are you with the amount of effort required for code, tools, and pipeline maintenance?

Onboarding

  • How important to your productivity is the amount of time it takes new hires or internal transfers to become effective on your team?
  • How satisfied are you with the amount of time it takes new hires or internal transfers to become effective on your team?

Developer satisfaction

  • How important is your satisfaction to your productivity?
  • How satisfied are you with your team's developer productivity?

3. Calculate the results 10 MIN

Once everyone’s completed the survey, close it, and review the data.

Next, assign each vital sign an opportunity score. If you have any outliers, call them out in your notes and discuss them with your team. You can use a spreadsheet tool to make your calculations easier, if you’d like.

Here’s how to calculate the opportunity score for each vital sign:

  • First, identify the average importance and the average satisfaction of your vital sign.
    • For example, 8.22 and 5.88, respectively.
  • Next, calculate the difference between the average importance and the average satisfaction.
    • For example, 8.22 - 5.88 = 2.34
  • Finally, if this number is positive, add it to the average importance to find your vital sign’s opportunity score. If the number is negative, your average importance is your opportunity score.
    • For example, 8.22 + 2.34 = 10.56

Opportunity score = importance + max (importance - satisfaction, 0)

Next, take the opportunity score for each of your vital signs and designate a traffic light rating:


🔴 15+ Extremely under-served areas that should be addressed first.
🟡 10-15 Improvement areas that should be addressed.
🟢 Below 10 Well-served areas that do not need to be addressed.

Note! If a vital sign’s average satisfaction score is higher than its average importance score, the vital sign is probably either not very important to your team, or your team is very satisfied with it already. In future iterations of the Play, you may want to replace a vital sign like this with one you want to watch more closely.

Tip: MAP OUT YOUR DATA

If it’s helpful to visualize each of your vital signs relative to the others, you can plot your results on a scatter plot.

Tip: MAP OUT YOUR DATA

If it’s helpful to visualize each of your vital signs relative to the others, you can plot your results on a scatter plot.

Telephone charades 15 MIN

Advanced math

An optional way to get more out of your findings is to calculate the satisfaction gap for each vital sign.

When you find the difference between the average importance and the average satisfaction of each vital sign, you’re calculating the satisfaction gap. That is, the difference between how important a vital sign is to your developers compared with how satisfied they are with it. A smaller satisfaction gap indicates that the vital sign is either of low importance and low satisfaction, or high importance and high satisfaction, and so, in both cases, that vital sign is less of a priority. Whereas a larger satisfaction gap indicates a vital sign is both highly important to the team and they currently are not satisfied with how the team manages it, and addressing the issue is a high priority.

4. Meet to discuss results and generate solutions 30 MIN

Finally, discuss the survey results with your team, identify the top three most pressing opportunity areas, and brainstorm solutions together.

To facilitate this important meeting, we recommend creating a Confluence page or Trello board with a simple vital signs table that lists your traffic light rankings. This makes for an effective, simple setup to keep remote or hybrid teams aligned. You can mark the most pressing opportunity areas and even share a link to the raw anonymized responses if you want to dig deeper.

You can also use Confluence whiteboards to create sections for each of your most pressing vital signs and crowd-source potential solutions, as well as add your own thoughts.

  • Circle back on ideas to check off the ones you’ll pursue.
  • Add action items to the backlog.
  • After your meeting, make sure everyone has access to the page and invite developers to continue to add ideas.

This meeting is a great opportunity to engage your developers in finding solutions, giving them more ownership over their developer experience. Offering a way for devs to have input can help them feel more invested in the outcome, which often leads to better follow-through and more consistent results. Diverse perspectives create better solutions, and it’s up to everyone to create change and grow, not just leadership.

Tip: DON’T SKIP THIS STEP!

Asking questions and not discussing the outcome is often worse than not asking at all.