This meeting isn’t a waste of time if you run it right
Do you hate spending time in situations where you have a feeling that nothing gets done? You wish you could run out of the room and focus on your work?
I know that feeling. I have it too. We all are quick to call out one common enemy…MEETINGS. And sometimes they sneak into our calendar without at least a description or agenda.
For Product Managers and development teams, there is one essential form of meeting. They save time and help the team be more productive. That doesn’t sound right? Well, I am talking about scrum meetings. Or stand-ups or daily check-ins. Whatever you call them.
I will share how I find them most useful and a tool I discovered that works great for remote teams.
First of all, no matter what form of meeting, we all want to be disciplined about scheduling them. Be a good meeting citizen!
* We think twice before we schedule.
* Always as short as possible.
* We add an agenda about what we want to discuss.
* We know the desired outcome.
* We capture action items and follow up.
That’s good practice.
The Chicken and the Pig
Who “owns” the stand-up? In a classic scrum approach, you have the almighty scrum master. And while we are talking about the classic scrum, let’s get one thing out of the way.
If you know this classic agile development fable, just skip this part.
One day the entrepreneurial chicken said to the pig: “I am sick of this farm life. I want to start a restaurant and you can be my partner.”
The pig said: “Okay but what should we name this restaurant?”
The chicken promptly replies: “Ham and Eggs”.
The pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thank you, I’d be committed and you would only be involved.”
A textbook scrum approach uses this fable to explain how a Product Owner is only involved, while the development team and scrum master is committed.
I disagree. As a Product Owner, I always felt as committed to deliver the product. My goal is to help the team where I can. We are one team, we win and we lose together. For me, the restaurant is called “Wings & Ham”. Sounds delicious, doesn’t it?
To make it clear: A Product Owner is the name of the role in scrum. Product Manager is the name of the job.
Especially in startups, I have barely had a scrum masters or project managers to run stand-ups.
The goal of these regular check-ins is for everyone on the team to stay in sync about what everyone is working on, their progress and blockers.
The most important part is that your team also sees value in them and finds them useful. For this, make the goal and meaning of the meeting clear for everyone. I do this regularly and point it out when working with a new team and when new members join.
For the frequency and type of stand-up, I have two different models I run. I will also mention a great tool that supplements the need for daily stand-ups and works well with remote teams.
The Daily — A classic stand-up
You and the team meet every day at a specific time. You all stand in a circle and everyone in the circle gives an update by answering these 3 questions:
What did I do yesterday?
What am I going to do today?
What is blocking my progress?
As people go through their update, they shouldn’t get interrupted. If someone has questions, they should follow up after.
As soon as long discussions start to happen, you need to intervene. Be rigorous. Other people in the team will be thankful. Nobody likes to stand there and listen to a completely unrelated topic.
It is useful to break out discussions after. With one team, we usually had lots of questions for each other. Until one day we made a rule. Whenever someone has a question, they have to bite their tongue and put a breakout note on the whiteboard.
After stand-up was over, people that weren’t involved in breakout sessions could leave.
In daily stand-ups, I don’t usually project the scrum board to the team while talking through tasks. If I don’t understand the connection between a specific task and the high-level story, I will use the breakout to ask.
The Not Daily — A regular check-in
These meetings run a bit different. Especially if it is not daily, there is a need for more information.
I want to help my team be as productive as possible. If the majority of the team doesn’t find value in a daily stand-up, we figure out a way that works better. This is rarely the case in engineering teams. I have seen this with data scientists and deep-learning teams. In these bi-weekly stand-ups, I focus on finding out the progress on the Stories or Epics that the team is working on.
Another reason could be that teams or parts of it work remote. I am talking about completely different time-zones, + 6 hours or more. It makes it harder to do it daily.
If they give me an update using the three bullet points from above, I have no connection between these tasks. For these meetings, I open up JIRA, project the Epics and Stories to all and then we go through them one by one to get an update. This should still be doable within 30 minutes or less.
On days where we don’t meet, we use Geekbot. https://geekbot.io
Geekbot is a Slack bot that asks your team about their daily update. The bot sends a daily message that you can customize. It works great for remote teams.
You can set the time that your team will get a reminder. At that time everyone has to answer your questions. I use the same 3 from the daily stand-up. You can completely customize the questions.
I find it great for this specific form of scrum meeting. You don’t meet every day and you can still stay up to date on the progress. It should take less than a minute for people to answer. It is really helpful and easy to set up.
I always scan for blockers to see if I can help and unblock them.
The Never Stand-up — Walk by and ask
I have a different routine with design teams. I am very involved in designing user experiences. I enjoy giving feedback and conversations around it. There is no daily stand-up. I don’t think it is helpful. I can look at their screen when I walk by and see what they are working on. Stand-ups have been established for developers because it is hard to figure out what someone is working on when you look at a screen full of code.
In my experience, all designers are open to me stopping by and checking in with their current work. I enjoy getting involved and discussing flows. As long as I don’t sense that they feel disturbed.
If that doesn’t work, I would have to establish a more organized routine.
Conclusion
To conclude, not all meetings are bad! We need to make them work for us and our teams. The stand-ups are most valuable when everyone knows what the goals are and follow a structure to keep them short and precise. Intervene when the team drifts off into conversations. Follow up with questions after. It is not science to run these but with every team having different dynamics, it makes sense to adopt nuances to what works best.
I would love to hear your learnings in the comments.
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