DEV Community: John

The Daily Standup is a Waste of Time

John — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 01:00:25 +0000

It’s the same daily standup you’ve been attending for years. You show up at the same time. Enjoy some small talk with your teammates. The facilitator eventually asks how yesterday went with someone’s work.

Updates are given. Details about one’s schedule in the past 24 hours. They end by explaining their plan for the current day. Repeat with the next person on the team until the daily standup is complete.

This format kinda…works.

I mean, it’s fine for some teams and sucks for others. Why do people complain about the daily standup in team retrospectives? Why are some ok with it and others not? After thinking about this for years, I’ve come to the following conclusion:

I don’t care what you did yesterday.

I don’t care that you had meetings about a side project. It doesn’t matter to me how many hours you spent coding. I don’t care if you had a dentist appointment and then made up the time later.

I care about how much progress the team made towards its goals.

In this post, I’m going to explore the problems my teams have had with the “around the room” daily standup format. I’ll explain the format we use that better scales to a growing team. I’ll then explore a different option:

Do daily standups even matter?

What is a Daily Standup?

If you are not familiar with the daily standup, it’s a daily meeting for a team to talk about the current project. It lasts for 15 minutes and involves each person in the room answering the following:

What did I complete yesterday that contributed to the team?
What do I plan to complete today to contribute to the team?
What impediments do I see that prevent me or the team from achieving its goals?

Detailed discussions should be avoided during the standup. Instead, these topics should be followed up the meeting is done. I emphasize “should” because these discussions are hard to avoid in practice.

For the rest of this post, I will be referring to this format as the “traditional” format.

The Daily Standup’s Format Problems

The problems with the traditional daily standup is a lack of focus and off-topic discussions. When I attend this meeting, here’s what’s going through my head:

I start thinking about my update to prove I should keep my job
People zone out when a teammate starts talking about how they worked on something that doesn’t affect me.
It’s finally my turn to give an update. No one is listening except for the facilitator.
We go over our time and end when the next team starts lurking outside the room.

I don’t remember most updates I’ve heard in a daily standup. This leads me to ask follow-up questions with my team. My colleagues then have to repeat the information they said in the daily standup. The only difference is that now I’m listening.

When does this daily standup format work?

I do think the traditional daily standup format works fine for small teams. If updates are done within five minutes, then the extra ten can be used to dig into specific topics. What’s great with a small team is that these extra topics affect everyone.

If everyone can summarize the team’s status, then the traditional format is fine!

It goes awry when the team gets larger than seven or so people. Larger teams bring new problems:

More people brings more status updates.
More updates mean more information that others won’t care about.
The team may be working on multiple projects at once.
If the team has customers, ad-hoc work will regularly come up.

Simply put, the traditional daily standup format doesn’t scale.

As a leader, it’s your job to pay attention to when people start checking out. When you start seeing this, it’s time to change the format of your daily standup.

A Daily Standup Format that Scales: Walk the Board

I’ve had a lot of success with using the “Walk the Board” format for larger Daily Standups. This format still answers the critical questions of the standup:

What was completed yesterday?
What is planned for today?
What blockers are preventing the team from making progress?

The main change is we stop giving individual updates. Instead, we get updates about every ticket on the board.

This daily standup format works as follows:

Bring up the board that shows the status of every item the team is working on.
Starting in the right-most column, get an update for each ticket in the column.
Be sure to ask: “What’s needed to move this ticket to the next stage of progress?”
Highlight blockers that people bring up and define what’s needed to unblock work.
Move to the next column to the left and get updates for each ticket in that column.
Continue until you get to the left-most column.

This format has worked well for larger teams. Everyone is more focused since we’re talking about specific tickets in a clear order. We’re not bouncing around topics based on where everyone is standing. It’s easier for everyone to prepare their updates since they know what is coming next.

Now, you may be thinking that this format takes a lot of time. It doesn’t!

Since you’re talking about specific tickets, the updates are smaller and quicker. A more focused discussion also prevents side topics from coming up.

What if the “walk the board” daily standup is too long?

If this format is taking too long for your team, it means you’ve exposed new problems.

If there are too many tickets to work through in the daily standup, how can your team commit to less? How you fix this is a topic for another day. In the meantime, I recommend reading the book Agile Project Management with Kanban.

Maybe the problem is the meeting facilitator. They could be letting people talk too long about topics and losing track of time. If this is the case, check out my article on how to facilitate collaborative meetings for guidance.

The above problems may not apply to you; every team is unique. If this is the case, spend time researching the problems your team is facing. Getting a deep understanding of your team’s issues will make it easier to find the right solution.

The Daily Standup Doesn’t Matter. The time after it does.

After attending daily standups for years, I started to notice something special. Standups frequently produced the same experience, but after the meeting…

Everyone on the team talking.

These weren’t just conversations of small talk. Meaningful information was shared. People were deep into problem solving. Trust was being built.

This behavior makes a ton of sense when I thought about it. People were talking with others that shared the same level of context. They weren’t burdened by time pressure or feeling bad for “wasting time” on a topic.

This freedom allowed everyone to talk about the problems they actually cared about.

This made me realize that the real value of a daily standup isn’t the meeting itself. It’s the time that comes after it.

Considering this, let’s stop trying to optimize the daily standup itself. Instead, use it as a catalyst to get our teammates away from their desks. Use the standup to start a conversation, but trust the team to finish it.

Conclusion

After all this, I still think daily standups are a useful tool for teams. The trick is that we need to focus on the actual purpose of the meeting.

Yes, we need to coordinate as a team. Identify blockers, get questions answered, etc.

But we need to figure out how to make the conversation effective for the team as a whole. What works for a team of five may not work for a team of fifteen.

As your team grows, take the opportunity to re-evaluate the format of this meeting. Look to understand the real problems facing it and adjust. I find that walking the board scales well to a larger team, but different formats may better suit your team.

At the end of the day though, the daily standup is not about status updates. It’s about getting smart people together to collaborate and solve hard problems.

What do you think about the Daily Standup?

We’ve all encountered some form of the daily standup. What formats have worked well in your experience?

If you’re on a remote team, how does your team use the daily standup?

Let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn.

How to Manage Existing Engineering Teams

John — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 02:59:43 +0000

Here you are, sitting in your regular 1-1 with your boss. You expected it would be a routine check-in with her – “How have you been?”, “What’s the latest status on yesterday’s support bug?”. Then she gets to her update.

Dale, a peer manager, has decided to leave the company.

You will be leading their team of mobile engineers until further notice. You know nothing about building mobile apps – you’ve been a backend engineer your entire career. There are many unknowns. Kotlin, Swift, and their frameworks are foreign to you. You don’t know the team, and some of the engineers are older and more experienced than you.

This is a daunting situation for new leaders and managers. An unfamiliar domain, you don’t have any answers to questions, and some of the team are ten years your senior. How do you manage an existing engineering team that works in a different domain?

Accept that the team knows more than you

The first step is to accept that you don’t know anything about this existing team’s domain.

Next, remember what your job is. Your job is to help guide people to make better decisions, learn fast, and achieve goals. Not contribute code.

Pay attention to how the team communicates. What are the relationships within the team? Who influences decisions? Whose voice is not heard? Your first step is to understand how this team works and how the people on it collaborate.

By focusing on how the team collaborates you can work on the problems with the environment. These are the issues that few are paying attention to or don’t know how to address. Solving these problems is where you can contribute most to the team’s success.

Ask questions instead of giving answers

Asking questions is a core skill of great leaders.

When someone is talking, stop thinking about how you want to respond. Instead, listen. Look for details in what they are saying that give you a new question.

By focusing on questions, you achieve two things. First, you get the other person to talk more and give you more information on the topic. Answering questions will also build trust – which is a critical resource for a to earn.

After a while, some of these questions will become redundant. What do you do when you have a deep understanding of the situation?

Ask more questions!

I know – it’s redundant, but your questions change at this point. Focus more on asking questions that guide the group towards the goal of the conversation. For example, take a meeting that requires a decision is made. Your questions should look to identify the detail that’s preventing the decision.

Example questions include:

What are the trade-offs and risks of each choice?
Who can we talk to to learn more?
How does this solution affect our team’s goals?

Partner with influential team members

Building trust with the team is critical to your success. You will need to build this through relationships with everyone on the team. The most important people to focus on are the influential ones.

These are the people everyone listens to. They mentor the rest of the team and help them grow. Decisions change once they raise their concerns. You won’t make any progress without them on your side.

How do you go about doing this?

You need to change your mindset of how you expect these relationships to be. Instead of being a coach, look to them as partners. This means you have to give them the space to own decisions in the domains where they are the experts. The partnership also requires transparency from you. Talk with these people about the problems you are observing on the team and see how they can help.

By agreeing on the problems in the environment, you will have the support needed to solve them.

Learn the existing team’s domain to follow conversations

At the start, you’re going to struggle to keep up with the team’s conversations. You must put in the time to learn the jargon and the systems that the team works in. You aren’t expected to become the foremost expert of the team’s codebases. Yet you must understand enough so you can empathize with the team. The goal is understanding since you will be an important advocate for these people.

Again, asking questions will be your quickest path to success. When in one on ones, if a report begins to talk about what they’re working on, dig deeper than normal. Don’t assume too much. Embrace your naivety.

Examples of questions to ask are:

Why was the code implemented this way?
What was the original purpose of it?
What challenges exist when working with this code?
How did the team decide to use that specific library?
How does this code fit into the architecture of the application?

You’ll also need to do homework on your own to learn what the team works with. Beyond the languages, identify the application’s key frameworks, systems, and libraries. Ask the team for blog posts, design documents, and book recommendations. This information will provide you with the context you need to finally keep up with the team.

Embrace Your Diverse Experience

You are going to learn a lot from the team – new technologies, jargon, systems, and more. This does not mean your experience is meaningless though.

There will be times where the team struggles with a problem because they think an imaginary constraint exists. I’ve seen this before – a client-focused team has had a history of problems working with a backend team. Things like adding a new API is assumed to take a high amount of effort.

This is where you can help with your backend experience. You can provide them insight into how the backend systems work.

Remember that your experience here is not about imposing your will. Instead, continue to focus on questions to identify assumptions. Once you discover these, you can start to add real value.

Conclusion

Becoming the manager of a new team is daunting no matter the situation. Particularly when the team works in a domain you have zero experience with. To succeed in this environment, you need to enter it from a place of curiosity. Ask a lot of questions, learn how the team does its work, and partner with influential team members. By taking these steps, you will discover the problems that are holding the team back.

With these problems in your mind, you can start to support the team in achieving their goals.

How do you gain the trust of an existing team?

I’d love to learn any tips you have to gain the trust of an existing team. The challenge of leading a group with strong relationships is daunting. How have you done it?

Let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn.

If you want to learn more techniques to improve your leadership skills, sign up for my newsletter.

Five Methods of Facilitation I use for Collaborative Meetings

John — Sat, 19 Dec 2020 12:53:08 +0000

The ability facilitate collaborative meetings is a critical skill for leaders. When done well, the facilitator creates an engaging discussion that has high attendance and prevents boredom. Most importantly, it creates an advantage for the team by aligning the group on the meeting’s topics.

Accomplishing these goals with consistency as a facilitator takes time. Each discussion will put your decision making, time management, and leadership skills to the test.

You will mess up at times, but the experience will provide important skills. I’ve been doing this for years, and I still screw up. I recently forgot to introduce the leading questions for a large retrospective discussion! We lost a ton of time from this mistake.

The purpose of this post is to teach you six methods of facilitation I’ve learned over the years. I’ll also throw in a story or two where I’ve completely screwed everything up so you can avoid my mistakes.

Method 1: Prepare for the Meeting

Meetings have the stereotype of being a boring waste of time. Your goal as the facilitator is to make the discussion worthwhile for people to attend. To achieve this, you need to prepare.

How I Learned the Importance of Preparing for Collaborative Meetings

At my first job, I gave a presentation to college students about my career path as a software engineer. I enjoy giving presentations, but I didn’t practice the story I would tell. It wasn’t a big deal – I knew the main details from telling friends. I didn’t even need to make a slide deck!

Fast forward to the day of the presentation. I walk up to the podium and start talking. What do you think happened?

I bombed the entire story.

I still knew the main beats of it, but without practice, I didn’t know how to connect them. I froze to think of the right words. Whenever I looked into the crowd, I saw…

Blank stares.

Silence.

After five agonizing minutes, I finished and went back to my seat. No questions, zero engagement.

I walked away from that day with an important lesson around public speaking. Regardless of whether I’m giving a presentation or facilitating a meeting, the same lesson applies:

Always prepare.

Being prepared provides clarity on how to engage with the audience. It gives you confidence in how to guide the group. You will know your stuff and everyone will see that.

How I Prepare for Collaborative Meetings

The first step towards preparation is understanding the goal of the meeting. The common goals I’ve seen are:

Making a decision
Gathering feedback
Sharing information
Group collaboration and interaction
Depending on the goal, the content will vary.

Let’s look at a meeting where a group makes a decision. For this discussion, you will have to outline the questions to answer, acquire contextual information, and figure out who should attend.

For a discussion focused on gathering feedback, the goal is different. Your goal is to get attendees to talk and share information. You can do this with an activity that gets people talking to one another. You could also provide a list of questions for the group to answer over the session.

Once you understand the goal of the meeting, you can use the following checklist of questions to prepare:

What do I want the group to walk away thinking about?
What will the agenda be?
Which questions need to be answered by the end of the discussion?
How much time should I give each topic?
How will I get attendees engaged with the content?
Who needs to attend the discussion?

With preparation, you will facilitate meetings with confidence.

Method 2: Find a Note-Taker for the Discussion

Recording the notes of a meeting is important for our future selves. They provide important context. Sure, some people will miss the meeting and use the notes to catch up. In my experience, the real value comes when you need to refer to the notes a year from now.

Meeting notes provide more than the details of the conversation. They capture why specific decisions are made.

Considering the value of meeting notes, you may think that it’s your job as the facilitator to write them down.

This is wrong.

Facilitating a meeting demands your full attention. You need to focus on sticking to the agenda and guide the discussion.

Having to record the meeting notes prevents you from doing all those tasks well. You’ll be too busy keeping up with what everyone is saying.

You should be focusing on how to guide the discussion.

In order to focus on creating collaborative meetings, an important method of facilitation is to find someone else to record the meeting notes.

Rotate Who Records Meeting Notes

Don’t have the same person take your meetings’ notes. The job comes with the cost of not being fully present in the meeting.

Also, this role often gets delegated to the women on the team. This is because we have been socialized to associate “supportive” work with women.

To create an inclusive environment, rotate the role of the scribe to different people. This will allow everyone to equally contribute to your discussions.

Method 3: Manage the Time to Prevent Boredom

How I Failed Managing Time as a Meeting Facilitator

Earlier this year, I was facilitating an org-wide meeting of forty engineers. We had a bunch of topics to work through within an hour, so time management was critical.

During the meeting, everything was going great! Good questions from the audience, we presenters sticking to the time, and I had a great note-taker.

Then we got to the open discussion topic.

I knew this topic was going to take a lot of time, and I reserved twenty minutes for it. The presenter was handling questions with ease, and nothing was surprising us. People were staying engaged, but we weren’t coming to a decision.

At this point, I decided to have this conversation take over the rest of the meeting. This meant bumping the last topic off the agenda.

I made the wrong choice.

While the discussion worked out fine, the presenter of the topic I removed wasn’t happy. I could tell he spent a lot of time on his slides to make sure people understood the work his team was producing.

This peer of mine deserved the space to celebrate the progress his team was making. I instead allowed the larger group to talk in circles.

This wasn’t the first time I allowed a topic to go past its time. I’ve done it a bunch in retrospective meetings. It was the first time where I saw the negative impact of disrespecting the schedule of a meeting.

How You Can Effectively Manage Time in a Meeting

Time management is one of the methods of facilitation to focus on. It’s also one of the most difficult tasks to oversee.

To effectively manage time, you will need to cut people off. This feels so rude. It feels like you’re not creating a collaborative meeting whenever you do it.

You must overcome this feeling.

To get past this internal hurdle, remember two things:

The goal of the meeting
Your job as the facilitator

Understanding the meeting’s goal will provide the resolve needed to interrupt others. If you want the discussion to achieve the goal of the meeting, it’s up to you to ensure that happens.

Regarding your job as the facilitator, your primary role in the meeting is to move the discussion forward. It is not to take part in the conversation.

No one cares about the goal of the meeting as much as you do. No one else is paying attention to the clock as much as you. It’s your job to make the time productive for everyone.

Getting over this feeling will be hard at first. I hope that remembering your goal and job will give you the resolve you need. People will respect you for respecting their time.

Method 4: Create an Inclusive Space for ALL Voices in the Room

Have you ever been in a meeting where someone said nothing for an hour, only to come to the group later with plenty to say?

Every time this happens to me, I always wish they spoke up sooner.

Then there are the people that talk to process their thoughts. They always mean well, but can often fail to listen to others.

As a facilitator, you’re going to need to figure out how to engage with these communication styles. Understanding these styles will make it easier to create collaborative meetings. Every meeting will have a mixture of extroverted and introverted communicators.

Extroverted Communicators

Extroverted communicators often process information in the meeting on the fly. Their primary model of communication is “talking to think”. These people will often be the most active members of the meeting.

Depending on the meeting type, they are great additions to the group. They will get others to talk and engage. For these situations, you won’t need to do anything to get these people to engage.

In other meetings, this communication style may be a detriment. Frequent interruptions. No space is given to others to speak. A lack of listening. This is where you need to manage the situation as the facilitator.

I recommend paying attention to how everyone else in the room is responding to how the person is talking. Look for people that are failing to get their word in on the conversation. When you see this, take the step to interrupt the current speaker and create that space.

You’ll also need to pay attention to when people interrupt others. Introverted communicators put a lot of thought into their words. It sucks if they get interrupted after a couple of words. Pay the most attention to this group in a meeting. If they get interrupted, stop the interrupter, and give the space back to the original person.

Introverted Communicators

The “quieter”, or introverted, communicators in the room need a different management style. I focus on making sure they come prepared for the meeting.

Introverted communicators spend a lot of their mental energy in deep thought. They want to make sure they have a full understanding of a topic before responding.

This is why they are often quiet in meetings – they are processing the information.

They want their words to be meaningful and clear when they speak.

To support this communication type, share preparation materials before the meeting. This will provide others time to understand the topics of the meeting. When they come to the meeting, they will be more focused on contributing to decisions.

The result will be a more engaging conversation from the most thoughtful members of the team.

Book Recommendation

To learn more about navigating different communication styles, I highly recommend the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking.

As an extroverted communicator, I often struggled to talk with introverted communicators. This book helped me in understanding how to engage with my teammates.

Method 5: Define Action Items for the Discussion

Depending on the meeting type, the method of facilitation you will need to use defining action items. While it’s easy to collect these items, the real challenge is following through.

To process action items, use this checklist when preparing for the meeting:

Work with your note-taker to record action items throughout the meeting.
Reserve 3 to 5 minutes at the end of the meeting to review existing action items and ideate on others.
Ensure there is an owner for each action item. This step is critical. If no one owns an action item, they won’t do it.
Decide how you wish to follow up on the action items. Will it be a week later at the team meeting, through email, or something else?

Depending on your relationship with the team, some action items will be assigned to you. If you are a leader of the team, this is normal. Your job is to support the team.

These tasks will often be things focused on the people of the team. Configure Jira, get in touch with a stakeholder, make sure that Dale’s birthday cake is delivered, etc.

How you tackle these action items on top of everything else is a post for another day. Remember that you can ask for help from the team. Maybe people didn’t feel like speaking up in the group to own an action item. They may be more amiable to own it after a one-on-one conversation.

For tasks that are assigned to others, your best bet is to check in with the owner about a week later. Often, people forget they had to look into the work and you asking about it will remind them.

Conclusion

A fundamental skill you need on the journey to become a great leader is the ability to facilitate collaborative meetings.

Putting the work into preparation will give you the confidence to hold the group accountable to an agenda.

Finding a partner to record notes will provide you the space to pay attention to the dynamics of the conversation.

In the meeting itself, it’s up to you to be focused on the goal of the meeting, the time left, and how the group interacts. Do the work to understand the communication styles of the group beforehand. Look to create space for different types of communicators.

Collaborative meetings are worth the time if you make them engaging for the audience. Your teammates will feel productive if they walk away feeling aligned with the decisions made from the discussion.

What methods of facilitation do you use?

I’m always interested in learning new ways to improve my facilitation skills. What other methods do you use that I didn’t cover here?

Let me know on Twitter or LinkedIn.

If you want to learn more techniques to improve your leadership skills, sign up for my newsletter.

DEV Community: John

The Daily Standup is a Waste of Time

What is a Daily Standup?

The Daily Standup’s Format Problems

When does this daily standup format work?

A Daily Standup Format that Scales: Walk the Board

What if the “walk the board” daily standup is too long?

The Daily Standup Doesn’t Matter. The time after it does.

Conclusion

What do you think about the Daily Standup?

Further Reading

How to Manage Existing Engineering Teams

Accept that the team knows more than you

Ask questions instead of giving answers

Partner with influential team members

Learn the existing team’s domain to follow conversations

Embrace Your Diverse Experience

Conclusion

How do you gain the trust of an existing team?

Five Methods of Facilitation I use for Collaborative Meetings

Method 1: Prepare for the Meeting

How I Learned the Importance of Preparing for Collaborative Meetings

How I Prepare for Collaborative Meetings

Method 2: Find a Note-Taker for the Discussion

Rotate Who Records Meeting Notes

Method 3: Manage the Time to Prevent Boredom

How I Failed Managing Time as a Meeting Facilitator

How You Can Effectively Manage Time in a Meeting

Method 4: Create an Inclusive Space for ALL Voices in the Room

Extroverted Communicators

Introverted Communicators

Book Recommendation

Method 5: Define Action Items for the Discussion

Conclusion

What methods of facilitation do you use?