What is the Value of Your Standup?
How many standups/daily Scrums have you attended that went something like this:
“Yesterday I worked on Feature X”
“Today I’m still working on Feature X”
“No blockers”
Or even worse:
“Yesterday: a bunch of meetings. Today: more meetings, hopefully work on Feature X. No blockers.”
What is the value of this status update? What vital information does this communicate to your team? If you’re a manager, what does this tell you about the work your team is doing? If you’re a product manager, what does this tell you about the state of your current product goals? If you’re an individual contributor, what does this tell you about the work in progress?
If you’re the person giving this standup, what are you communicating to your team?
If the replies at daily standup are rote, terse, and communicate little in the way of valuable information, then it’s a sign that you’re doing the ceremony just to do the ceremony, which is a waste of everyone’s time.
It’s probably gotten even worse if you’re fully remote and doing asynchronous standups in Slack (of which I am a huge fan, just not like this). You might even have a Slack reminder every morning, or a bot that asks the questions:
What did you do yesterday?
What are you working on today?
What are your blockers?
And therein lies the problem. Nearly every organization I’ve seen practice “scrum” like this has either gotten lazy or isn’t paying attention to the value and actual purpose of the daily meeting but rather cargo culting the ceremony because that’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re capital-A Agile.
Stop it. You’re doing it wrong.
The purpose of the Daily Scrum/Standup
Daily standup is meant to be about transparency, collaboration, and organization. It’s meant to facilitate a team working together to achieve some set of goals. It’s meant to surface those things keeping us from hitting the goals and to keep your team in the loop on what’s going on in case anyone can (or needs to) jump in and help.
But that’s not what’s happening on most teams. Most teams have turned daily standup into a status meeting where the result is little more than people accounting (vaguely) for their time.
I’ve recently seen this article making the rounds as a remedy and while it does a great job identifying the problems, going card by card and asking the team to talk about its position on the board is just a time accounting status meeting from another angle. The board should tell you just about all you need to know about status from a glance, and as a manager/product owner you can and should ask direct questions about work in progress if it’s not moving along and you’re not getting answers from stand-up, but a daily project status meeting of every card on the board, as the kids are saying, ain’t it.
Ask Better Questions
The three questions, in the shortened form above, are steering you far away from the intent of the daily standup. By shortening them in that way, which so many teams have done, we’ve lost the plot.
Here are the three questions as described in the Scrum Alliance Scrum Guide:
“What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?”
“What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?”
“Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?”
Can you spot the difference? The former set of questions asks you to account for your time. The latter is asking you to talk about the value of your efforts.
I’d wager a year’s salary that the vast majority of people who both run and participate in daily scrum type meetings have never read the questions in their original form and don’t actually know what kind of answers they’re intended to drive at.
I like to do a slightly different version, but it falls into the same lane:
“What did you accomplish/learn yesterday?”
“Did anything slow you down or get in the way of doing what you planned to do?”
“What are your next steps?”
“What could get in the way or what might you need help with?”
“Is there anything the team needs to know?”
Flipping the first question to a focus on accomplishments or what value you created with your efforts makes some things obvious. Had a day where you didn’t accomplish much but did learn something? Share that knowledge.
The second question is all about why you might not have accomplished what you set out to do. I don’t like asking “are there any blockers” because people see “blocker” and think “wall”, but true blockers are far less often the problem. It’s not the walls that kill progress, it’s the river crossings and muddy bogs and quicksand and slippery slopes that kill productivity. Coming from the angle of looking at anything that slowed you down with a more critical eye will uncover a lot of organizational waste in the form of both tech debt and process debt.
Focusing the next question on your specific plan makes sure you have one. Don’t know what your next steps are? Now’s the time to dig in and plan it out or ask for help doing so. And in doing so, you should try to anticipate any obstacles or things you might need help with. This may prime other people on the team to jump in and help, or offer insights and information you may not have.
Finally I just like a prompt for people to think about what additional context it would be good for the team to have. “I have training all day Tuesday” and “I’m on vacation next week” or even a shared link to a great blog post about how to do daily standups are a great use of this space.
Five whole questions! I know. Seems like a lot. How will we ever make it through the morning?
Give Valuable Answers
If we go back to the earlier, rote versions of the answers:
“Yesterday: a bunch of meetings. Today: more meetings, hopefully work on Feature X. No blockers.”
and
“Yesterday I worked on Feature X, Today I’m still working on Feature X, No blockers”
We can see right away that “a bunch of meetings” doesn’t belong anywhere but squarely in the “what kept you from accomplishing” category. And if one of those meetings was hella valuable and you learned something important, it goes into that first accomplishment question. If the rest were unnecessary and just stole your time and forced too much context switching, this is the time to call it out. Nothing improves that isn’t first identified as needing improvement.
Most meetings, turns out, are blockers.
We can see that “work on feature x” doesn’t tell us anything we shouldn’t be able to get from whatever tool we use to track work in progress (kanban board, sprint board, whatever). In fact, if “work on feature x” is the answer for too many days in a row, we should be surfacing that in either the “what do you need help with” or “what’s keeping you from accomplishing” section. And it’s okay if what you need help with is clearing meetings from your plate, or maybe a code review is still pending, or maybe you just haven’t found the right way to do something and need a second set of eyes.
Rather than “Worked on feature X”, tell your team what progress you’ve made. “Stood up an API endpoint, got stuck because I forgot about CORS”, “created the form layout”, “wrote tests for the email validation” and even “talked with product and got more clarity about requirements” are all significantly more valuable bits of information than “worked on feature x”.
It may seem a little like splitting hairs, and that giving more specific answers is just putting more work into accounting for your time, but it all goes back to the value and purpose of the standup. Part of being an agile product team is team ownership of the whole product development process. If everyone was intended to just do their thing in a silo, we wouldn’t bother having team ceremonies around communication.
And if you didn’t accomplish anything of note, this is the time to talk about why. To surface the things that kept that from happening. Even if it’s that the world is on fire and you just didn’t have it that day. It happens. In your second answer, talk about how you’re going to get back on track. Or talk about the help you need.
Remember, standup isn’t about accounting for your time. You shouldn’t feel like you have to hide behind vagaries if stuff beyond your control kept you from hitting your target. It’s about communicating where we are and where we’re going.
This is also an area where having asynchronous, text-based standup can really shine. If you’re putting in the effort, this daily report becomes a changelog that anyone on the team can refer back to if needed. If you go on vacation or get sick and someone else needs to pick up your work, they can read back through your standups to get a sense of where things are and get up to speed.
We want our answers to the daily standup questions to read less like a status report and more like a conversation starter. An invitation to comment and ask questions. An opportunity for other people on your team to engage in your work. Think about it like you would on a date or in an interview — terse, perfunctory answers create communication dead ends but a little bit of detail opens the door to better conversations.
Engage with your Teammates’ Answers
On the flip side of that, everyone on the team should be reading (or actively listening to) everyone’s standup and engaging where necessary.
Developer: do you have info that could be useful to your teammate about what they’re doing? Do you have time to pair with them? Can you set an expectation about when you can get to a PR? Let them know! Want more info on how they did something? Ask them to elaborate! If it’s too much to cover in the moment, use the moment to set up time for a quick chat.
Product manager: do you want more information on how close something is to being completed? Don’t schedule a meeting later, ask them right now! The resulting conversation might yield way more valuable information than you expect. Maybe we need to change scope. Maybe you can track down more information if something is unclear. Maybe you haven’t been able to see the progress and just want a quick demo or screenshot. Ask!
Engineering manager: do you see that someone is struggling to move things forward after a few days? Or that someone has too many blockers? Come down from 30,000 feet and help your team coordinate, or get answers. Be a snowplow and clear the road for them.
And hell, maybe you don’t have anything to ask or anything useful to add. That’s cool. Just do an emoji reply or make eye contact and nod. Don’t make your team (and yourself) feel like you’re just sitting alone at a desk firing these updates into the void every day.
I’m a big believer in the idea that we shouldn’t be doing anything at work that isn’t creating value, and the daily standup is as good a place as any to examine your ceremonies and see if they hit that mark.
