Could you elaborate on the "Team Topics"?
During a check in, if there is a follow up question to dive deeper on, how does the flow for that work? I watched the demo video but wasnt able to catch it.
Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
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Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#152Or we could just do our work and not deal with a daily standup. Can we get an App for that please? or maybe a JIRA replacement? or AI that can go instead of ME?
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Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#153Could you elaborate on the "Team Topics"? During a check in, if there is a follow up question to dive deeper on, how does the flow for that work? I watched the demo video but wasnt able to catch it.
Sounds like the typical "parking lot", where you just move long discussions to the end of the standup, and everyone who's not involved can leave.
If there are multiple parking lots, either you go through them quickly (if it's a series of questions affecting only a few team members), or you just break into breakout groups.
Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% on “prep that doesn’t get done”. We have a slackbot at my place of work that asks people to do extremely quick updates for yesterday, today in lieu of the standup. Even getting people to consistently do that is an exercise.
Yes. As a lead with a team spread across time zones, I’m constantly reminding (nagging) people to check in. I don’t want to have to corral people into a ‘least inconvenient’ meeting slot to get updates.
This is because demanding that people spout what they did since yesterday is not how to manage humans. You need to engage with them. Call them up (voice ideally, but a slack DM thread is ok) and ask questions like they're another human being (not : what did you do since yesterday?).
Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#155Firstly, 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 g…
As an EM, I use documented standups to keep track of how long and when people work on tasks. When a person is under performing, this document is invaluable reference. When a person is exceeding expectations, this document helps me write their promo doc. This could could be useful to manage that data better, but currently I use a Google Doc sheet. That being said, I couldn't justify the cost of this tool to my manager…
Can I ask which company you work for? I want to be sure I never work for them.
When they say "people don't quit jobs, they quit managers"... pretty sure they mean you. God, that's toxic, and I'm so sad you're in our industry.
Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be okay in isolation, but eventually as the entire team of engineers start to underdeliver, the team and company does get affected in terms of feature rollouts / velocity, and it's difficult to recover from it. People won't want to suddenly correct / do more work even if it's crucial, and they can point to their previous underestimated commitments and say that is a full week's worth of work. YMMV as with a…
Parent said "boss is happy with output", there is no underdelivering here.
The actual work doesn't change, it just changes your point estimations. Either the boss is happy with the actual pace and quality of the work, in which case you don't need points to begin with, or the boss doesn't understand the difference between story points and actual time, in which case it's all a dog and pony show anyway.
All this teaches employees is to lie to make themselves look good. If you really want to increase development velocity, implement better coding practices and devops and tooling and training and invest in your employees instead of making jump through stupid hoops like circus animals.
Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel sad for your teams. I mean this with respect but you should consider management training.
This strategy is set by my manager. The only feedback I am seeing in this post is how standup should be used to report blocks. I encourage my team to message me when they have questions and not to wait until a sync meeting to report issues. We rarely discuss blockers because those are address in 1:1 or project focused meetings.
It's not async vs sync thing, it's that you're perverting stand-up from a tedious but low-stakes collaborative process (hey, what's everyone working on, who can help me with this quick problem...) to a grueling and ruthless micromanagement process that gives you false metrics to judge your employees by. It's a sign that you don't really care about your people or your team or their morale and just want to find easy numbers to evaluate people by, the engineering equivalent of "you're fired because you clocked in three minutes late four times this year". It's totally irrelevant to the job at hand...
Yeesh, it scares me that there are people like you who actually think this is a good management style. It's not even a management style, it's just petty sadism. Please seriously consider another career, this is not good for anyone on your team. Sorry to be so harsh, but god damn, this is one of the most braindead, heartbreaking, soulsucking posts I've ever seen on HN. Your team deserves a better manager than you.
Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's disappointing that standups are used in this way. I don't know you and I don't know your team but this kind of approach to standups is probably wrecking your standups. The standup has it's roots in the agile manifesto[0] (gross simplification). Specifically "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". The coming together every day for just a few minutes is an opportunity to ask for help (blockers). B…
> The coming together every day for just a few minutes is an opportunity to ask for help (blockers). The rest of your message about unblocking early seems to contradict your first statement of waiting until scrum to ask for help.
I don't think I suggested that someone should wait, just that the opportunity to talk about blockers (ask for help) was important.
Each of the loops is about shortening the cycle before you discover problems. These are seen through the lens of traditional waterfall software development. The problems vary in nature, from technical blockers and dependencies, to unrealistic deadlines and expectations, to not building what the customer wants (why we involve the customer early and do showcases).
In some ways the more mature your team becomes the more you can move past some of the rules. The 'standup' was designed to avoid the meeting becoming overly long, everyone would become foot sore. Once you understand and embrace making the meeting not turn into an hour long (or even 30 min long) meeting, the standing itself becomes less important (which is good because remote teams make this harder).
Similarly, there are even shorter cycles of being able to remove blockers now. Granted Slack team channels can be a blessing and a curse, but it does make it possible to just put problems out there for consideration[0]. These sometimes go unanswered though, which means that the aforementioned standup becomes a backup.
I've been part of so many lean/agile teams that all do things slightly different. The highest preforming of those were the ones where the trust was the highest. Great teams become "a rising tide lifts all boats"[1].
I hope you don't see this (and the previous post) as an attack. It's near on impossible from a distance to really see. It felt like a red flag but that's two lines of text on a semi-anonymous message board.
[0]: draft PRs also fall into this category. Though again, devs have to find time to read them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_rising_tide_lifts_all_boats
Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's disappointing that standups are used in this way. I don't know you and I don't know your team but this kind of approach to standups is probably wrecking your standups. The standup has it's roots in the agile manifesto[0] (gross simplification). Specifically "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". The coming together every day for just a few minutes is an opportunity to ask for help (blockers). B…
A large part of Agile, at least from what I remember in my ScrumMaster training, is to recognize reality. You estimated that you would do x amount of work. You only did y. Or, you did x + z - wow, you are a great performer. You should verbalize your success more often. A part of confronting reality, is confronting the prospect of under-performing employees. I think your 'ideology' is blinding you a little bit OP, at…
> wow, you are a great performer.
No, you aren't. You just either suck at estimation, or you deliberately underestimate to shine brighter in the eyes of your slavemaster. And if the rest of your team also "overperforms" consistently, there's a conspiracy, which means I will stop making you commit on stuff and will just ram more tasks down your collective throats, abandoning another aspect of the agile way of work.
See how easily such an abuse of standups can be turned around to make the very same person look bad? If that is possible, is the approach a good one?
> most dev teams don't give a whit about Agile and just do stand-ups to keep the PMs and SMEs appraised of progress
This is mostly related to PMs and SMEs pushing a perverted interpretation of Agile.
Re: Launch HN: Spinach.io (YC W22) – Better daily standups
#160Has anyone else noticed the number of comments (and upvotes) that are very likely fake/misleading? Many 1-karma accounts that I doubt made their first comment only because they love this product so much, and other founders/colleagues/cohort that are probably just friends. I get this is the "growth hacking" mindset, but it really sucks. I wish this wasn't allowed on HN. This product clearly wouldn't be anywhere near t…
"Launch HN" is a perk/benefit available to some YC-funded startups, so it's sort of "unfair by design". https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html
I didn't know that fake engagement and alternate accounts are part of the perks. Makes YC looks really legit if companies can't even market themselves without shady tactics.
As soon as I see something like this it makes me want to run the other way and tell everyone I know to run the other way and never ever touch the product or company.