Team Dynamic Labs

What it is

Team Dynamic Labs is a platform for team assessments. A team takes an instrument on their phones in about five minutes, sees everyone on one shared map, and walks away with specific guidance for how each pair of people works together.

The flagship instrument, Team Dynamic Styles, places each person in one of four behavioral styles based on two things colleagues can actually observe: how much you assert and how much you show. It builds on a four-quadrant model that has been used in workplaces since the 1960s. The questions and guidance are original work.

Two more instruments are planned on the same platform: a 360 feedback process and a DISC assessment.

Why I built it

Years ago a consultant named Mark Nevins took my leadership team through a behavioral styles assessment. We were skeptical going in. It worked. We rolled it out to hundreds of people in the office, and the four styles became part of how we talked to each other, down to laptop stickers and Slack emojis. Five years later a former colleague still remembered me as "an Owl."

In twenty-five years of running technology teams, it's the one tool I've seen that people embrace easily and that has more impact than you'd expect. But most teams never get to use it, because it usually needs a paid facilitator and the tools facilitators use are dated. I wanted the same experience available to any manager, and a better tool for the coaches who do this for a living.

How it works

• Join in seconds. The team lead shares one link or QR code. Nobody needs an account to take it.
• Watch the grid fill. Results appear live on a shared screen as people finish. Everyone sees their own result first.
• Talk about the pairings. Sixteen short guides, one for each combination of styles, explain where two people will click and where they will grind, and what to do about it.
• Prepare for real meetings. Reads generated from the team's actual results: a forecast of how each person will show up to a meeting, a brief before a one-on-one, and a structural read of the whole team.
• Keep it. A team's results and history stay readable forever, whether or not they ever pay.

Who it's for

Team leads who manage six to twelve people and have no facilitator or budget. They run the session themselves from a script, and the first full session is free.

Coaches and facilitators who bring it into their own engagements. The tool handles the administration that eats their time, like sending links and chasing people who haven't finished. The client team owns its data from day one, so when the engagement ends, handing it over is a billing change, not a migration.

I'm not a coach and I don't take engagements through the platform. When a team decides it wants professional help, the goal is to connect them with a practitioner.

What makes it different

Most assessment tools produce a report. The insight is real, but six weeks later nobody remembers it. Team Dynamic Labs treats the assessment as the starting point and puts the effort into what keeps it useful: the live room experience, guidance tied to specific colleagues, and history a team can come back to.

Next on the roadmap is Practice Mode, a simulated session that lets a team lead rehearse walking through the grid before the real meeting. Watching early users, I noticed many created a second team just to test the flow. Nobody wants to run a session like this cold.

Ground rules

These are published on the site so users can hold the company to them:

1. The individual sees their own results first, always.
2. Development tools are never used for hiring, promotion, or performance review.
3. Raw 360 comments never go to the manager.
4. Participant data is never sold to employers.
5. Research-backed, or clearly labeled as not.

How it's built

I built Team Dynamic Labs myself, working with AI coding tools rather than a development team. It runs on Next.js with Supabase and Vercel. The platform was designed from the start to carry multiple instruments, with billing kept separate from the logic that decides what each customer can do.

It's also an experiment in running a company differently. The plan is for the first "employees" to be AI agents handling support, triage, onboarding, and marketing drafts, each with clear limits on what it can do on its own. Anything involving refunds, billing, or deleting data goes to a person.

This is the same kind of work I help portfolio companies with: architecture, build versus buy, and how to set up a development organization, now including what an AI-first one looks like.

Team Dynamic Labs is a Downeast Ventures company.

Contact

If you coach teams, run a facilitation practice, or work with assessment tools and want to help shape what comes next, I'd like to hear from you.