11–20 of 156 posts
It’s important to strike a workable balance between putting everyone to sleep and unblocking issues quickly.
I'm not a huge fan of in-person standups, but if you're going to do them really make sure they're useful and efficient. I worked at a small startup once where the entire company (~12 people) did a daily standup, which meant listening to what the salespeople were doing every day, and then telling them which bugs I was fixing. Overall pretty useless.
When I was doing daily standups it could be useful for people to say what they are blocked on and then for someone else to say that they could try to help them. Where it wasn't useful was if the two people tried to solve the issue during the standup while 10 other people were standing around. My other pet peeve for our standups was that they would not start on time. This was very common when I started on the team. Af…
Standups must rank in the top 10 most used cargo cult practices in the tech world.
Amazing to watch a good, collaborative idea that was used amongst people who actually like working together on something they sort of care about be distorted into some dystopian mandatory process that literally no one likes or gets value from.
- It makes it easier to parse information, reread, and catch things like hey 2 people are working on the same thing.
- Helps catch people stuck/avoiding work as you can see someone on the same task for 5 days, or rotating between 2 to 3 tasks when none are done.
In terms of discussions, questions or post standup followup, a thread tends to get started per checkin which could lead to a meeting. This also creates a good historical trail for when issues come up.
Though I am a huge slack fan, having a channel per project/epic and any conversation had or meeting gets summarized and put back into the chat
At my last office gig employing daily standups they quickly devolved into a thinly veiled attendance check combined with a passive aggressive attempt to shame unproductive team members on a daily basis.
It became just another reason for me to never come to the office. At the time I was in a very head-down overworking phase of life and the leadership would turn my participation at standup into a major component in that shaming tool, because I always had a disproportionate amount of things to discuss.
s/Daily Standups/Status Reporting to Management/ Standups must rank in the top 10 most used cargo cult practices in the tech world. Amazing to watch a good, collaborative idea that was used amongst people who actually like working together on something they sort of care about be distorted into some dystopian mandatory process that literally no one likes or gets value from.
Every morning, each team member posts a short bullet list of the items they are planning on working on that day, along with details about any things they are blocked by. This happens asynchronously as people start working every day, so one person might post their message at 7 am, while another person posts at 10 am.
Any conversation that needs to happen about someone's daily status message happens in a thread under their message. This gives the team and management an easy way to see what each other's intentions are for the day, without a bunch of distractions or bullshit meetings or people's eyes glazing over while someone goes on a side tangent rant for 10 minutes. Instead, the information is quick and to the point.
It's also very common for people to post a summary message at the end of the day to let everyone know what they actually got done (or didn't get done).
Our whole team is remote, and this method seems to work really well for us.