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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

#111

Post by mikhael28 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #92
itake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guarantee you're driving some employees to worse performance because they're depressed from having a meeting every single day at which they have to justify their continued employment. This kind of thing is absolutely soul-crushing. You're likely also straight-up killing standups as a collaboration tool for the team. They work best when the team can be very open and honest. This use of standups ruins that. You proba…

As a bona-fide, certified, rarified SCRUM-MASTER here (respect mah authoritay), I just have to say - does anyone really think a standup is a 'collaborative' meeting?

It's a check-in meeting! If you weren't productive yesterday, just say so - as long as you are generally keeping your commitments and shipping your features on time, it's fine. If you are behind, you can verbalize it - and if it makes sense, it makes sense. If it doesn't, well you are starting to break the bonds of trust between teammates. That's on you. And high performing teams don't have a place for that.

Now, if that's not the culture at your company, then you frankly have much bigger problems than a stand-up meeting.

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

#114

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

vertis wrote: post #24

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 g…

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.

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

#117

Post by thedougd »

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.

I didn't intend to come off as highly critical, but I think the tone followed my arc of interest and disappointment.

SSO shouldn't be a manual setup, as many SaaS products offer self service SAML or OIDC configuration. I heard the SSO tax is often used as a filter for larger companies that will drag you through lengthy security assessments as part of their vendor process. That makes sense, however, these days, SSO is hardly limited to larger organizations.

I see you offer Google sign-in at the lower tier, and the same workaround could be available for Microsoft. If you offered sign in with Microsoft, I can use my Okta SSO, without your involvement, because it is already configured within my Microsoft organization. I would imagine Google + Microsoft would cover the vast majority of organizations.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/dev...

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

#119

Post by yamtaddle »

mikhael28 wrote: post #111
yamtaddle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guarantee you're driving some employees to worse performance because they're depressed from having a meeting every single day at which they have to justify their continued employment. This kind of thing is absolutely soul-crushing. You're likely also straight-up killing standups as a collaboration tool for the team. They work best when the team can be very open and honest. This use of standups ruins that. You proba…

As a bona-fide, certified, rarified SCRUM-MASTER here (respect mah authoritay), I just have to say - does anyone really think a standup is a 'collaborative' meeting? It's a check-in meeting! If you weren't productive yesterday, just say so - as long as you are generally keeping your commitments and shipping your features on time, it's fine. If you are behind, you can verbalize it - and if it makes sense, it makes sen…

A check-in meeting is still a collaboration tool (the phrase I used), so... yes? But I get the sense you're using these words differently from their normal meaning, so it's possible that in some jargon-sense they're not, because a check-in meeting can't be a collaboration tool because those have strictly exclusionary definitions, or something. But under ordinary usage of the terms, yes, sure, a check-in meeting's probably usually a collaboration tool. I don't even know how it wouldn't be, except, again, maybe under some "house" usage of the terms, or if the meeting's gone pathological and is just a zombie-meeting serving no purpose at all.

My main point is that the meeting should chiefly be for the team doing the work. They're the ones whose collaboration (yes!) should be served by the meeting. If the meeting's a bunch of people taking turns saying stuff the rest of the team already knows, or doesn't need to know, to turn it into a status report for a manager, that's a shitty standup for a bunch of reasons. If a manager's basing fire/raise/promote decisions off data gathered in standups, people are gonna avoid saying things they ought to, and say tons of shit (maybe even true shit! Not necessarily lies) that no-one but the data-collecting manager needed or wanted to hear. Those kinds of practices tend to change standups to make them far less useful to the team. The useful-to-the-team communication that the standup's supposed to encourage will instead happen elsewhere, or even not at all.

That is how you get standups that the ICs dread and derive no value from. It's how you get people half-sleeping the whole time except when they have to talk. It's (part of) how you get half-hour standups. It's a big step down the path to the agile-as-micromanagement thing that's much of the reason so many people hate agile, as it exists in the wild.

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

#120

Post by pc86 »

itake wrote: post #66
vertis wrote: post #24

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 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…

I'm an EM as well and this is horrible, both from a personnel management standpoint but also just from the "understanding what the standup is for" standpoint.

You should be using standups to hear what your teams' blockers are, then spend the rest of the day getting rid of those blockers.

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