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Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

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Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#21

Post by talmi »

DocTomoe wrote: post #4

Hm, from a purely agile standpoint: This seems to reduce daily stand-ups to status report meetings (and then, why have a stand-up at all?). Does a stand-up that is over in 5 minutes (and has 10-15 minutes of prep time) really bring value to anyone but a team lead?

Great question Our goal is to make standups more effective, not necessarily faster. We found that by adding more structure and allowing people to easily prepare, the result is a more effective meeting that in many cases is also faster. The prep experience actually makes preparing really fast by leveraging your previous tasks/goals

Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#22

Post by dev360 »

recroad wrote: post #8

Tried similar tools and ad-hoc processes during the pandemic. None worked as effectively as turning your camera's on and walking the board for 15 minutes. In fact, the chance of miscommunication increased when we introduced tooling like this. Though agile has been bastardized and gotten a bad rep, it's core values of "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and principles like "The most efficient and e…

I agree with you there. We did email-based stand-ups for a while and ditched it. It devolved into a mechanical habit of "everything is going great" type answers that nobody payed attention to..

The async aspect of it is convenient, but for me as a team lead, often times the standup is also an opportunity to ask follow up questions, to see if stories are on track, or to determine if somebody would benefit from pairing for the day. These things become increasingly important if you have an uneven balance of dev experience or domain knowledge within the team.

Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#23

Post by talmi »

jacknews wrote: post #9

Is this what agile/scrum is now? I feel burned out just reading it. IMHO the 'standup' (keep them on their toes!) was always suspect if it was just a PM 'what have you done lately' meeting. Progress can be reported asynchronously. IMHO the point of having the team together daily is to raise exceptions/problems/blockers/whatever to the rest of the team, and perhaps co-ordinate the rest of the day.

Totally agree on the point of having dailies. For days where there's no blockers or other items to discuss we support async as well. The idea is to allow a more dynamic meeting series which is live when needed and async on days when the team only needs to share status.

Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#24

Post by vertis »

Firstly, congrats on launching. Hard work is hard.

I don't want to be negative on your launch day, but at the same time feedback is important.

1. I couldn't see myself or the many agile/lean teams I've been part of using this. I don't feel enough of a burden when walking the board for this to be worth the money.

2. A user in spinach.io costs effectively the same amount as a user in Slack, the difference is that I'm going to use Slack all day every day and assuming the use of this tool it's a once a day task.[0]

3. Bringing 'intention' and 'structure' feels a little like it will become a straitjacket.

4. Moving talking during a standup to 'prep time' seems like it would remove any of the time benefits you're quoting. Worse that time would better be spent updating Jira/Trello/whatever, people don't do this reliably, so the prep becomes one more thing that doesn't get done.

This is only one data point, and there is of course the classic "what do we need Dropbox for we have FTP" HN comment, so don't be disheartened either. As PG has said (paraphrased), one of the reasons to launch quickly is that you haven't really begun until you've launched.

Having said that I'm happy to continue providing feedback as you iterate (my contact details are in my profile).

[0]: Enterprise price point is incredibly hard. Got to get enough dollars to make it worthwhile, but that excludes smaller businesses like mine that feel like a death by a thousand cuts from all the SaaS subscriptions (I know you have a free plan).

Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#25

Post by joshwillis2000 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #13
recroad wrote: post #8

Tried similar tools and ad-hoc processes during the pandemic. None worked as effectively as turning your camera's on and walking the board for 15 minutes. In fact, the chance of miscommunication increased when we introduced tooling like this. Though agile has been bastardized and gotten a bad rep, it's core values of "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and principles like "The most efficient and e…

To add, the stand-up loses its value if it becomes rote; people will tune out or wait for their turn to speak. One trick we're using is that the order is always random, and whoever's turn it is gets to pick who is next. Ideally you pick the one who is not paying attention.

Yeah, totally agree on this. Needs to stay fresh. Curious if you've seen other ways of keeping people engaged.

Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#26

Post by talmi »

asutekku wrote: post #20

As I see it, this doesn't reduce the the overhead at all but just increases it by introducing a third party tool to the mix and requiring everyone to engage with it. Sure, it might help if your daily standup is already a mess, but overall just by fixing the process by having a single person running the daily and making sure no-one starts to ramble too much solves the problem of excess time spent in dailies. Assuming…

Agree a single person running it can help. In many cases that doesn't happen or folks just don't like playing that role so the app takes care of it

Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#27

Post by mchusma »

talmi wrote: post #12
thedougd wrote: post #10

I have to pass after two minutes of looking. I'm in a small, but mature company of ~250 employees. We're on Office365 and use Okta for SSO. I see a MS Teams icon on the front page, click pricing, don't see MS teams in the integrations list. Then I see SSO under Enterprise, call us for pricing. I'm out. I have to have SSO for a few reasons. 1) It's a common sense security measure and greatly reduces employee onboard/o…

Thanks for the feedback We plan to integrate with Teams and for now teams running their standups on Teams use our web app. We do support SSO, just need to set it up per customer which is why we ask folks to reach out for the enterprise tier.

As a user, I also hate non-transparent pricing and call for sales. I also dont buy many things if I can't see transparent pricing.

BUT as a 2x SAAS business I found that this absolutely worked. Make them call. I hate that it works. I have tried irrationally hard to make transparent pricing work for larger customers, and failed. I don't think it's a law of nature, and in some cases it can work. But generally, talk to larger customers.

I think SSO (particularly something like Okta) means they will be a client with whom calling and talking to will be a net positive for you and the business. This is basically the single most obvious feature to segment off.

Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#29

Post by gtsteve »

My company is a small business but we require Okta SSO for every app. What is the reasoning behind SSO being an enterprise feature (aside from the fact that most SaaS apps do that)?

This is a blocker to us using many SaaS products because the enterprise tier is always very expensive. I think TeamRetro got it right with SAML support at the first paid tier, we started with a smaller plan and stepped it up as we grew.

So, perhaps you might consider providing SCIM support at the enterprise tier and SAML support at the business tier? I feel this is a nice compromise between security and administration hassle.

Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups

#30

Post by joegahona »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #15
jacknews wrote: post #9

Is this what agile/scrum is now? I feel burned out just reading it. IMHO the 'standup' (keep them on their toes!) was always suspect if it was just a PM 'what have you done lately' meeting. Progress can be reported asynchronously. IMHO the point of having the team together daily is to raise exceptions/problems/blockers/whatever to the rest of the team, and perhaps co-ordinate the rest of the day.

> Progress can be reported asynchronously. Progress shouldn't even need to be reported; it should be obvious from the board, when it comes to communicating upwards. And IMO that's only relevant to the scrum master (who needs to ensure everything is going smoothly) and maybe the product owner; above the PO level, if they care about progress during a sprint they're paid too much. The level above PO should only care abo…

I've had better success with face-to-face standups. In my experience, "progress should be obvious from the board" and async "standups" have been far less effective than actual standups. Lots of engineers are introverted and hate writing; a good product manager can extract context and blockers via voice (without making it feel like a pop quiz or a blame game) that a shy engineer might be hesitant to broadcast in writing in Slack, and other engineers/designers are _far_ more likely to hear the person when they're speaking than they are to read their boring Slack update (or, even more unlikely, read through that other person's tickets). My rule of thumb has been to keep standups to 7 minutes max, have the other 7 minutes after for any breakout that's needed, and schedule something else if there are still thorny issues to go through.

If there are issues with standups bloating to 30 minutes (???), that feels like a process/weak-PM problem, not a tooling problem.

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