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Meetings are forcing functions

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Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#111

Post by marcosdumay »

superxpro12 wrote: post #92
katzgrau wrote: post #12

There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same. But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool. Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting fo…

I have a theory that these short meetings are not the root cause, assuming a trustworthy team. Having these standups... weekly, daily, whatever-y... it forces the PM to track deliverables. Which means you have to DEFINE the deliverables. And it sort of trickles from there. The actual hard part is doing the PM Work. Defining deliverables, making tasks in jira (or excel :p), estimating work, and assigning reasonable du…

If you have a formal team, you need formal recurrent meetings. A team doesn't exist without meetings.

It does force the management to manage the team, yes. But it will also remind the team they exist, and everybody that they can talk to everybody else.

That said, weekly is on the limit of how often you can make those. And you have to make sure your people are not formally in too many teams.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#112

Post by drewbeck »

superxpro12 wrote: post #92
katzgrau wrote: post #12

There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same. But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool. Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting fo…

I have a theory that these short meetings are not the root cause, assuming a trustworthy team. Having these standups... weekly, daily, whatever-y... it forces the PM to track deliverables. Which means you have to DEFINE the deliverables. And it sort of trickles from there. The actual hard part is doing the PM Work. Defining deliverables, making tasks in jira (or excel :p), estimating work, and assigning reasonable du…

In my experience a good async culture is sustained by regular, high-quality check-in meetings. They serve as connecting moments that support team cohesion and camaraderie.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#113

Post by Rapzid »

ghosty141 wrote: post #50
xwowsersx wrote: post #37

Nah. A forcing function creates pressure toward an outcome...a standing meeting just creates pressure toward the meeting. Those aren't the same thing. The moment you put a recurring block on the calendar, the implicit contract shifts from "we make progress on this work" to "we show up on Tues at 2". The meeting becomes the deliverable. And it always stays long after the original need has passed because nobody wants t…

Yeah. The real thing that creates pressure is the people applying that pressure if progress is not made. If people act that way the meeting is an effective way to do this on a weekly base instead of letting it languish over month(s). If nobody in the meeting actually cares that the feature isn't getting finished, then the meetings value is rather small.

It's not the source of the pressure per say, but it's the transmission medium. There are other outlets for pressure like regular demo days and etc.

Ultimately yes the true source of the pressure is coming from the "tribe".

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#114

Post by Schiendelman »

theptip wrote: post #105
superxpro12 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory that these short meetings are not the root cause, assuming a trustworthy team. Having these standups... weekly, daily, whatever-y... it forces the PM to track deliverables. Which means you have to DEFINE the deliverables. And it sort of trickles from there. The actual hard part is doing the PM Work. Defining deliverables, making tasks in jira (or excel :p), estimating work, and assigning reasonable du…

Yes, and - there is also something about the visceral feeling you get when your turn comes up in standup and you didn’t update any tasks and you don’t know the status of the thing you promised for this week. If the PM does the task list and then chases the engineers 1:1, it’s a different chimpanzee brain mechanism at play. Very easy to forget/ignore you are letting down a whole team in this mode. (And the flip side i…

This is exactly why I do it (as a PM). The average engineer gets way more of the important work done when they have to say what they did and when, if they're blocked, they know I'll actually help unblock them.

And when the standup itself is five minutes, people are still refreshed enough to talk about a book or tv show or show off the progress they're making building a deck or let their kid say hi.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#115

Post by Schiendelman »

Hendrikto wrote: post #81
ralferoo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A short weekly standing meeting The problem is that management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting. It doesn't take long until the meeting is no longer short, switches up to daily, isn't standing because there's too many people and/or everyone is WFH. I think one of the biggest problems in management is that managers are super focused on making their management tasks easier at the expense of their r…

> In general, [managers] prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing. Most of the time they don’t even know what everybody is doing, or why, or how. But they like to fool themselves into thinking that, because ??? it given them the warm fuzzies, I guess. Then they just wasted ever…

As a manager, I would hate that. Have small groups of 5-8 do standups. There's no reason to waste ten thousand dollars a day on that many people waiting for each other's status updates.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#116

Post by andrewflnr »

ttoinou wrote: post #104
andrewflnr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among other factors, lots of people don't read "things already shared and written before". Like, ever.

Someone in the meeting has to do this though ? for the meeting to be useful

Someone does, I guess. Whoever writes it hopefully read it at least once, though that's not guaranteed these days. Most other people would rather do anything else, so if they can possibly get away with just hearing it, they will. Reading and comprehending is much harder work.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#117

Post by solatic »

maccard wrote: post #77
Nathanba wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it seems tautological to us because it's obvious to us. But other people do not understand or care to understand or even care to think about it. You can see it in this very comment section that there are people swearing how amazingly helpful fixed standups supposedly are even on a whole org level. It's obviously absurd but they have different jobs and priorities, they don't have to understand the inner workin…

I’ve been on both sides of this. Engineers who complain loudest about the waste of time from too many meetings will also complain the loudest about how they feel disconnected from the decisions and from the product IME.

Decisions rarely need to be made on-the-spot in synchronous meetings. You can have asynchronous approaches with shared documents and RFC processes, where you make everything available if people want to contribute to areas that they find interesting. This does not, of course, mean that decisions need to be made by committee, and people who provide feedback should understand that getting the privilege to provide input does not mean that they also get a veto.

It's quite rare to find companies that do this for the same reason it's quite rare to find companies willing to "do agile correctly" and really scope out work before sprints and not put additional work in the middle of a sprint. It takes too much effort and gives up too much flexibility for most managers to make the investment and see if it pays off.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#118

Post by ttoinou »

andrewflnr wrote: post #116
ttoinou wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone in the meeting has to do this though ? for the meeting to be useful

Someone does, I guess. Whoever writes it hopefully read it at least once, though that's not guaranteed these days. Most other people would rather do anything else, so if they can possibly get away with just hearing it, they will. Reading and comprehending is much harder work.

I have the same experience. Literally no one wants to read anything, they will always try to minimize the work done and pretend they've read. And when they've read, they weren't focused and the information isn't used for the project. I have no idea what to do here

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#119

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

timssopomo wrote: post #87
Silamoth wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot (most?) companies, management serves as the bosses over engineers. So good luck telling your boss they’re not allowed in your meeting.

You don't tell them they're not allowed. You ask them what they need from the meeting and how so you can free up the time from their calendar, or what they need to comfortably delegate the responsibility to you. Managers don't do this stuff for funsies they do it because they don't trust that their team won't go off track because of something they don't know.

They want, as described above, `20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing`.
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