Building a Learning Culture — The Team Sync

Now more than ever before, startup culture moves quickly and requires fast iteration and experimentation. In order to do this effectively, learning has to be baked into the culture at a deep level. You have to be able to try things, fail and recalibrate in order to succeed in startup. More than that, it has to be acceptable and enabled from the top down. Since we, at Subatomic, believe this is so important, we are starting a new series on building a learning culture in your company, beginning with our approach to the regular company all hands or team sync meeting.

We’ve all been in meetings with no clear agenda or outcome. When it comes to our work day, time is precious and unproductive meetings can drag down our morale during the time we do have. One such meeting that we’re all subject to can tend to be the company team sync. While this can be a good opportunity for bonding, culture building and questions to leadership, it often ends up being a droll exercise where people on the team give updates on their last sprint’s worth of work with limited amounts of learning or actionable to-dos following the meeting. Rather than round robin updates from the team, which typically don’t benefit the team as a whole, we propose a different strategy focused around learning where clear action items are defined during the discussion.

As you might expect, our approach is a little different. The team meetings at Subatomic are centered around three simple questions.

• What did we try this week that worked?
• What did we try this week that didn’t work?
• What do we want to try next week?

In each question area, members of our team discuss things that happened in the previous week and, as a team, we discuss what our hypothesis was, what we learned from the item and what we would do differently, depending on the outcome from the exercise. It’s great to talk about the things that we tried that went well but the best conversations come out of the things that didn’t. This is where we get into the deeper conversations that shape us as a company and end up making our processes better for our current and future customers. When we learn something from our weekly experiments and discussions, we document the findings or update existing processes in our team knowledge base. If there are follow-ups or action items that result from a discussion, those are documented and reviewed in the next team meeting so there is accountability around the decisions the team made and it’s made sure they don’t fall off from week to week.

The interesting thing that happens is the more typical update centric meeting type conversations still occur in this style of meeting. By talking about what you tried this week, we pivot the conversation from being primarily progress report based to more experiment based and the cadence of doing these weekly forces constant experimentation and iteration from the team but the progress conversations manage to surface naturally. Of course, we do budget some time at the end of the meeting for updates from leadership with time for the team to ask questions, as well.

This style of meeting might also seem similar to a team or engineering retrospective. For posterity, a retrospective is a meeting where you talk about things that went well or didn’t go well over the last sprint. It’s true that this meeting is similar but by structuring the team questions in this way, we’re more proactively encouraging experimentation, learning and willingness to fail from the team whereas in a retro, the conversation primarily tends to focus on fires put out by the team or the same less actionable progress updates from a standard team meeting.

We believe firmly that a learning focused team meeting is a more big-A-Agile way to iterate and learn together as a team. From week to week, since switching to this team meeting style, we’ve noticed that the conversations are more engaging and also that there tends to be more overall discussion by the team. Constant learning, experimentation and willingness to fail builds a more resilient team and allows us to develop ourselves faster than others in our space, which we pass on to our clients in the form of faster deliverables and more actionable advice based on experience.