3V Performance Poker: Ensuring Team Alignment
If you’ve ever tried to talk about performance in a team and ended up with everyone nodding politely but thinking completely different things, this one’s for you.
3V Performance Poker is a quick and revealing way to surface assumptions, compare perspectives, and start real conversations about what alignment looks like in your team.
It’s not about good or bad. It’s about finding a shared understanding of how Value, Velocity and Vitality show up in your everyday work.
What is 3V Performance Poker?
3V Performance Poker is an extension of our 3V Performance Framework - Value, Velocity, and Vitality. It's an alliteration mnemonic that emphasises the critical areas of focus for building successful teams, products and organisations. 3V is designed to easily integrate into your current operational flow and encourages an ongoing bias to positive action.
Value - focusing on what's important.
Velocity - playing the game at pace.
Vitality - ensuring we stay the distance.
The focus areas of 3V are both complementary and competing, highlighting the tension that exists between them. This tension is crucial for achieving success and must be visibly managed through active prioritisation.
3V includes an integrated set of performance controls and supporting performance questions connecting performance conversations to action that aligns leaders with their teams.
We’ve already explored how 3V helps teams unlock their potential and how leaders can strengthen their agile governance. 3V Performance Poker extends these concepts and turns them into a practical team exercise.
It’s simple, visual and often sparks the kind of discussion that metrics alone don’t explore.
Why We Love It
Performance can be a hard topic to raise. Too often, it feels like something that’s done to teams rather than with them. If it’s done at all! We often don’t pause long enough to ask whether we’re heading in the right direction.
3V Performance Poker changes that. It gives everyone a voice and creates a safe space to compare experiences and perspectives.
We love it because it:
Brings performance to life through open conversation.
Helps people balance perception with observable evidence.
Builds a shared language between teams and leaders.
Feels playful while still delivering serious insight.
When We Use It
We use 3V Performance Poker when we want to:
Start performance conversations with both leaders and their teams.
Help a new team define what success looks like.
Reflect at the end of a project or sprint.
Connect team insights with leadership expectations before introducing automated metrics.
It’s especially useful when you want to check alignment and set clear expectations before moving into more detailed measurement or data analysis.
How We Do It
It is played using 3V Performance Questions that explore how well the team is performing in each area of focus - Value, Velocity, or Vitality.
Every player has a set of 3V Performance Poker cards consisting of the following choices:
Sweet as - No drama’s here … it looks good from where I’m standing.
Bit iffy - It’s mostly working … but there are a few niggles we should probably get onto.
Not flash - Yeah nah … this isn’t going well. We could do with some help.
Dunno yet - Bit on the fence with this one … I need more info.
How to use the cards
Speed Poker - Dealer reads out each 3V Performance Question and everyone plays a card. Keep it fast-paced with no discussion yet. Dealer just records the scores and reads out the next one. This gives you a snapshot of where the team sees its 3V Performance.
Prioritise Questions - look at the results together and prioritise which of the 3V Performance Questions are most important to action now and get to green. To get started, pick the one or two that matter most in your context.
Share Insights - each person shares their insight on a stickie describing what they are seeing, hearing or feeling that shaped their card choice for the prioritised 3V Performance Question.
Create Alignment - discuss the insights for the prioritised 3V Performance Question and align any outliers. This is a critical step.
Agree Actions - agree on a practical action that would help move the 3V Performance Question closer to green and Sweet As.
That’s it. Simple, fast and surprisingly revealing. The real value comes from the conversation that the cards inspire.
Things to Look Out For
Encourage honesty, not consensus - differences reveal insight and don’t need to be apologised for.
Keep the pace steady - a light tone and good energy make it easier for people to speak openly.
Balance the voices - don’t let the loudest person set the tone for the group.
Look for patterns, not just points - capture themes and actions that help move things forward.
Make it a habit - revisit your results regularly to see what’s changed and celebrate progress.
Try It With Your Team
At your next team retrospective, go through each of the 3V Performance Questions and play a round of 3V Performance Poker.
You’ll quickly see how much clarity and alignment can come from a short, structured conversation.
If it works for you, make it part of your regular rhythm - a way to keep performance conversations open, visible, and Sweet As.
Our RAFT Series
✦ 3V Performance Poker is one of our CoLab RAFTs - Rapid Agile Forecasting & Tracking techniques. Practical tools we use every day in our coaching and training to help teams make work visible and performance-focused.
Updated on 6 October 2025
