this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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Depends on the team. My team do daily standup and it helps. A lot. "What are you working on today and do you need any help to get it done" is a super powerful question to make sure we're all focusing on the same priorities and sharing the knowledge we have, especially in a team of mixed disciplines.
Why not reach out to reach to each team member on a daily or semi daily basis to ask that question?
These meetings REALLY get in the way of progress and we've been killing it ever since our new manager started doing it like this
I actually tried a daily slack bot instead. The team HATED it with a passion. And the amount of productivity lost on other teams to a backend engineer blocking a systems designer being blocked by a UX flow etc is insanely large. We have never missed a deadline, hit all our revenue targets, and get much. much larger features done in 2/3rds of the time of the next nearest team. Part of that is because we've made sure to reinforce the concept that we are a single team instead of a group of server engineers, backened engineers, frontend engineers, system designers, [removed to protect identity] designers, econ specialists, UX designers, UI artists, and QA working in their own bubble.
I really don’t understand how a 5-10 minute meeting can get in the way of progress
primarily because both context switching and progress builds upon itself so stopping & switching has more impact than those 5 or 10 minutes suggests. (ie. you can stop a car from rolling down the hill with just one finger if you do it early enough but in reverse).
also standup meetings have a way of getting longer and covering more ground that what was initially planned for. (ie meeting mission creep)
When I worked as a PM that's what I used to do - daily check in about any obstacles that I could clear. Took me a little while to get around everyone but it didn't waste everyone's time
I hear you, but I disagree. My people are great at slacking me or each other when they need stuff. We have a great collaborative atmosphere. They set up meetings with each other and with me as needed, and I’ve heard over and over that they really like that. I have weekly 1:1 meetings with each of them, and usually we hang up after 15 minutes because they know what they’re doing and can get back to it.
I mean it really depends on the team. My role is as much translator as anything else. I have:
Infrastructure/Server
Backend
Frontend
Designers (three different kinds)
Performance/Econ specialists
QA
Hearing "Oh I didn't know that, yeah we need to sync" is a common occurrence and on a team of nearly 20 people we never take more than 15mins. We have shared deadlines, shared goals, and work on shared user stories. Having that moment in the morning to go "okay, am I blocking anyone without realising it?" or "I gotta remember to make sure design knows the spreadsheet won't have the thing they were expecting today, it'll be Tuesday instead" is well worth the time.
On top of that, with WFH it's a really good way to cement the team aspect. I wouldn't care so much if we were in the office, but all being remote means we lose the "human" behind the screen a lot.
As I said, different teams and different projects need different things, but I'd argue the reason my team is the number one performing in the entire company is, in part, due to this morning time to get that alignment.