Digitize your standups!
Standups are an essential tool on software teams for exchanging information and ensuring alignment. Having used standups — along with other agile principles and practices — at both Refinery29 and Google to ship successful software projects across distributed, cross-functional teams, I believe they are a cornerstone of successful product development.
However, the way standups are traditionally run — a 15-minute morning meeting requiring a team to literally “stand up” in a circle and talk about what they did yesterday, what they’re going to do today, and whether or not anything is blocking them — is not without its flaws. First, many developers I talk to don’t really like the idea of “standup” at all. It seems like a silly ritual that’s used as a forcing function to get people into the office at a certain time. It’s also really annoying to have your workflow interrupted on a daily basis. And even though the meetings are supposed to be short, often one person’s 30-second status will devolve into a 5-minute side conversation involving a fraction of the team, while everyone else stands around bored and disengaged. Worse, someone might be constantly interrupting and usurping the meeting, which will most definitely lead to a derailment.
Beyond the process just being annoying at times, it can also be impractical. If you work with a distributed or a remote team, trying to get everyone into a daily meeting at the same time across different timezones is a logistical nightmare. You might also be working with contractors or team members “borrowed” from another organizational unit, that have their own set of meetings and commitments. This leads to a combinatorial explosion of organizational issues that devalue the spirit of the process, which is to make work more efficient.
So what can we do in order to make sure information is flowing efficiently throughout our teams on a daily basis, without introducing additional friction? As soon as I started thinking about it, the solution was as simple as it was obvious. It dawned on me that the “standing up” part of standup — where everyone had to be in the same physical place at the same time — was the problem. Eliminating that, while preserving the information flow aspects of standup, was the solution. The answer I came up with was to make standups digital.
My general approach with digital standups is to use Slack, given its ubiquity on tech teams and its penchant for solving a lot of archaic corporate communications problems. I usually make a #standup channel for my team, and create some sort of generic template that my team agrees to use. Something like:
*Standup <YYYY-MM-DD>**Yesterday*- Thing I did
- Another thing I did*Today*- Thing I will do[optional]*Blockers*- Any blockers I have
The team doesn’t necessarily have to use the same template, but I provide it for them just to take the busywork out of them having to come up with something themselves. Plus, it makes the channel really easy to scan for information.
The team commits to entering in these statuses before a certain time + time zone each day (e.g. 2pm Eastern, if the majority of the team is based out of the NYC time zone), so that everyone has enough time to do what’s needed to get on the same page and get unblocked.
I didn’t realize just how impactful having a digital standup was until I actually put it into practice.
First, the whole class of problems related to trying to get people into a daily meeting at the same time and place every day disappeared completely. This not only made everyone on the team happier and gave them more flexibility, but it also meant that I could free up a lot of my time (more than I’d care to admit) historically spent trying to book rooms, coordinating with remote workers, and advocating for the process. Instead, we all just posted into the Slack room before the agreed-upon time and that was the end of it. Remote team members I worked with outside of HQ timezones were particularly happy with this practice, because it means that they could have a normal workday and post when it made sense for them.
Second, standups became much more efficient. If there were follow-up conversations to be had about something, they could be done as threads for an individual’s standup status. This meant no more waiting around for a conversation irrelevant to you to end. Anyone who was relevant to a specific standup item or blocker could be @mentioned and would get a notification to follow up. People could simply skim any standup items that weren’t immediately relevant to their day-to-day work.
The most important and most profound benefit, however, came from the realization that we now had a written record of all of the work we were completing every day. I could use this for recaps, reporting, and planning with my peers and with senior management. If we had a question about why something was done a certain way, we could literally search through our standup logs and find the answer. At the end of every sprint, we could look back on our standups and see if there were any recurring themes we wanted to visit in a retrospective.
I’ve done digital standups with 3 teams so far. Each time it has been different, but every time it has been successful.
I started digitizing standups when I was team lead for the analytics team at Refinery29. Even though everyone was co-located in NYC, it seemed like no matter what time I moved standup to, someone would miss it. This told me that the process was not working for the team, and I did not want to force the team to use a process that they clearly hadn’t bought into. On the other hand, we were making great progress on our project, and I attributed a lot of that to the agile processes we had agreed to adopt. It was here that I first came up with the idea of digital standups, and the team agreed to try it out. From that moment on, everyone posted in the standup channel in Slack. When we had our first retro after switching to digital standups, it was clear the team was happier. We continued doing this for the duration of my time on the team.
When I went to Google, I became tech lead for Material Components for the Web. At that point, the team consisted of two developers, a PM, and myself in NYC, one developer in London (from the Material Design Lite team), and a technical program manager in San Francisco. We were practicing agile and doing traditional standups, but coordinating them was extremely difficult across an 8-hour SF/London timezone gap. We decided to go the digital route after realizing how much of a nuisance coordinating standup was for everyone. Because Material Components for the Web was an open-source project, we could use Slack for communication. I set up the same infrastructure for standups as I had at Refinery29, and we had largely the same results. It was especially useful for our developer in London, who could now post their standup statuses on their own time rather than having to be inconvenienced by our timezones. It also allowed me to go back through a record of what everyone was working on both for performance reviews and for reports to senior management. Our PM and TPM, both of whom had a myriad of additional responsibilities besides Material Components for the Web, did not post every day, but always read the statuses and expressed to me on multiple occasions how helpful they were.
After I left Material Components for the Web, I joined a team on Google Cloud focused on business intelligence for the “Product Excellence” of Cloud’s products. This was also a distributed team, with half of the team based in NYC and the other half based in SF. Once we got to the point as a team where we needed to employ some agile practices, we went directly to digital standups. As an internal Google team, we used Hangouts Chat to communicate, and my coworker wrote a chat bot that would remind us to post standup notes at a certain time every day. We didn’t use a pre-defined template; instead everyone just posted with their own style, since that’s what they wanted to do. It worked just as well and allowed us to coordinate work more efficiently.
In my experience, doing standups digitally eliminates many of the drawbacks of the traditional standup meeting, while maximizing its benefits by providing a historical record of each meeting. However, doing standups digitally requires a baseline level of trust that your team is going to report in every day, read everyone else’s statuses, and follow up with action items when needed. I’d argue that building this baseline of trust amongst your team is important regardless of whether your team is going to do digital standups or not.
In the future, I’m going to investigate a tool called StatusHero which I have never personally used, but looks like the next logical step in this workflow.
