Effective Team Practices

In the current article, I want to briefly describe command practices that I have used in my work.

Design Review Meetings

• Who: Designer, one front-end product senior developer, one back-end product senior developer.
• When: When we have just a draft of the task and design.
• Why: To identify potential problems as soon as possible that we could encounter during implementation.

Refinement Meetings

• Who: Product managers, all product front-end developers, all product back-end developers, product QA.
• When: When the design and description are ready for development; can be one meeting for several tasks.
• Why: To synchronize all tech team members about future tasks, receive feedback and basic evaluation, and share knowledge about the product.

Requesting Tasks Through Common Channel

• Who: Developer.
• When: When a developer needs a new task.
• Why: To maintain transparency regarding who is working on what task and to prevent task accumulation in developers' backlogs.

Task Planning Meetings

• Who: Front-end developer, back-end developer.
• When: After task assignment.
• Why: To synchronize particular developers about specific tasks and create a technical plan for the task.

Task Plan Approval

• Who: Front-end developer, back-end developer.
• When: Asynchronous, after task planning meetings.
• Why: For big, complex tasks, to align expectations before starting.

Short Daily Required Sync Meetings

• Who: All product front-end developers, all product back-end developers.
• When: Daily.
• Why: To synchronize the status of tasks; important to be short, focusing only on status and problems, with a maximum duration of 30 minutes.

Short Leads Required Sync Meetings

• Who: Team leads from front-end, team leads from back-end.
• When: Daily.
• Why: If there are a lot of people in commands, we can synchronize separately and then sync only at the leads' level.

Tech Retro

• Who: Front-end developer/back-end developer.
• When: On-demand.
• Why: To share knowledge about complex technical tasks/solutions.

Demo Retro

• Who: Front-end developer/back-end developer (optional).
• When: After each middle/big size feature.
• Why: To share knowledge.

Socialization Meeting

• Who: Front-end developer/back-end developer (optional).
• When: Weekly, maximum 1 hour.
• Why: Just for socialization, to discuss work or personal matters.

Research Day

• Who: Front-end developer/back-end developer (optional).
• When: Monthly.
• Why: To maintain expertise and provide suitable solutions for complex tasks.

One-on-One Meetings

• Who: Developer, team lead.
• When: Monthly.
• Why: To provide feedback and address problems and achievements.

I have provided a brief description, and not all practices may apply in every company and project structure. However, I believe they can be useful to know about.