Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: standup

  • Reinvent Your Daily Meetings

    Reinvent Your Daily Meetings

    Are you still doing daily meetings in the format suggested by Scrum? The three famous questions:

    1. What did you do yesterday?
    2. What are you going to do today?
    3. Are there any obstacles?

    Do yourself a favor and stop.

    It might have been a useful practice two decades ago. But it is not anymore. Not in that form.

    The Old Cure

    Here’s the thing. The ideas behind Scrum date as far back as the 80s, and its first applications happened in the 90s. Yes, it’s that old. But that itself doesn’t deserve criticism.

    However, when you look at the 2000s, when Scrum got its prominence, your average team’s tooling looked very different. The visual boards were yet to become popular. The state-of-the-art task management system was a filtered list.

    Jira dashboard from the 2000s

    No one in the IT industry seriously talked about limiting WIP then, so we were drowned in an excessive amount of ongoing tasks. That made navigating long, long lists of work items even more of a maze from nightmares.

    It’s no wonder that people saying what they were doing yesterday and what they plan to do today was a refresher.

    The New Situation

    Fast forward 10 years, and teams suddenly have very readable visual boards as a standard practice. Limiting work in progress may still be a challenge, but we’ve gotten progressively better.

    Also, new visualization standards allow for better comprehension of whatever is in flight. Even Jira caught up.

    Jira visual board from the 2010s

    As long as:

    • the board is up to date
    • there’s even remotely reasonable amount of work in progress

    we can clearly see who’s doing what.

    How? Just look at the board—it’s all there; thank you very much.

    And if, by any chance, the board would suggest that a person still works on 5 different things, then it’s not the form of the daily meetings that is the main problem.

    Who Cares?

    If you still think the old form of the daily updates makes any sense, look at people’s engagement during them. There’s precisely one person who’s interested in the entirety of the updates.

    The Scrum Master.

    For the rest of the team, it’s a ritual they follow out of habit. At best, they are interested in what a couple of people working on the most related tasks are doing, and then they’re off again.

    So it’s like a theater with many actors and just one attendee (the Scrum Master).

    It’s even worse. Almost all that information is readily available on the visual board. So that one person could have gotten it without getting everyone involved.

    Not Just a Status Update

    That’s the point where people tell me that I describe a daily meeting as a glorified status update, which it wasn’t meant to be.

    Fair enough. So what is it?

    A way for a remote team to get together and gel? Fine, get together and gel. I doubt that answering who does what is the best way to do it.

    So, maybe, it’s a place where we discuss obstacles and problems. Fantastic! That’s actually the only original question that is still useful. Then, ask only that bloody question and be done with it.

    Whatever the purpose of the meeting is, name it. I bet there’s a better format to address that very purpose.

    And yet, in 2025, people will still answer those three questions invented three decades ago.

    Daily Around the Board

    The intention behind the original standup format was a team sync-up. That goal is still worth pursuing. However, we have options that weren’t available a quarter of a century ago.

    My default way of running dailies relies on four elements:

    • We use blockers extensively to show any impediments
    • We keep the visual board up to date (it’s “the single source of truth”)
    • We run dailies around the board
    • We read the board from right to left (or from most to least done) and focus purely on blockers

    That’s it. It’s enough to focus on the important stuff. The rest is business as usual and not worth mentioning.

    You can easily cut the daily meeting time by half (or more), make it more engaging, and (a bonus) use it as an encouragement to keep the board up to date.

    There’s literally no coming back.

    The Purpose

    Sadly, we still stick to practices. They might have been visionary decades back, but somehow, we stopped asking about their purpose and blindly stuck to them.

    If we did, we would challenge many of the techniques we use.

    Ask yourself this question: If Agile were invented today, what practices would it devise? It would most definitely be different from what you’d find in a Scrum Guide.

    So do yourself a favor, stop answering the three standup questions, and, for a change, start using this daily hangout to make something useful.

    That’s what Agile intended us to do, after all.

  • Better Standups

    I never fancied the standard standup schema. I mean I see value in sharing what the team did yesterday what the team is going to do today and what are the problems the team has.

    Except these questions aren’t answered on a typical standup.

    The first problem is that we answer what specific individuals have done and will do. In any but smallest teams it’s the wrong focus to have. I mean if there are two or three of us it’s very likely that such updates are meaningful. With a couple more people we gradually lose track, and eventually interest, in what exactly is happening in the rest of the team.

    At the same we should be focusing on what is important for the team which may be something no one mentions because for example the biggest pain point is on a plate of someone who is absent or overwhelmed with other stuff that just doesn’t allow them to focus on the real problem.

    The second problem is that very rarely someone really answers to anything by first two questions, namely the issues part is often omitted. I like tweaking the third question, for example to something that Liz Keogh proposes: ”what I would rather be doing.” It helps only a little bit though as it’s almost as easy to avoid this question as the original one.

    The third problem is that with a bigger team a standup becomes just long and boring, and whenever a couple of people exchange a few sentences about any specific bit of work it shuts down almost all the rest of the team instantly.

    A very typical change I introduce is a standup around a board, be it a task board, a Kanban board or what have you.

    Then the discussion is mostly around important stuff that is happening right now and is visualized on the board. A typical pattern is: blockers first, expedite items second, stalled items third and then all the rest. I covered more elaborate version of this approach some time ago.

    Such an approach means that not everyone, every single day speaks up. But whenever anyone has a problem or is just trying to solve an issue too long there’s definitely an update from them on the way.

    Then, there’s always a call for action regarding important stuff, even if it just so happens that a default person for that item is unavailable.

    This means that standups around a board encourage collective ownership of work.

    In fact, there are way more call for action situations as this form of standup basically focuses on solving issues. This often means helping each other, taking over bits of work from others, etc. Whenever someone has hard time coping with all the stuff that waits for them they usually get an instant help.

    This kind of a standup is also shorter than a classic one. After all you don’t mention all the boring stuff that just goes as planned – everyone can see that on the board, so what’s the point anyway?

    It also is an occasion to catch all the inconsistencies on the board so it serves another purpose too. You don’t get that from a classic standup.

    I would also point that this approach does very good job in terms of keeping work in progress low. It simply changes the dynamics of the discussion toward everything that is in progress from a team perspective instead of work started by individuals. The latter doesn’t take into account all the waiting queues.

    Finally, it scales up pretty well. You can run such a standup with a dozen or more people and it still fits nicely 15 minute slot. It’s not rare when you need only one third of that even with such a big team.

    The impact of changing the standup pattern is almost instant. All in all, it makes standups more valuable for the team. Try this approach, especially when you struggle with the current one right now.