Standups: Individual → Teammate
I was asked about standup meetings the other day—
When should they be run?
How long?
What topics?
How big a team?
What questions?
People
Hang on. We’re missing the point here. What fundamental human need is met by a morning standup? Not what does the team need or the organization need or the users need. The geeks, when they meet in the morning, what’s going on?
It’s tempting to view the activities of a software development team as a kind of board full of knobs/levers/gauges. Too many bugs? Turn up the tests. Not enough responsiveness? Plan more often.
While practices do have observable effects, there is a deeper, more human & humane, interpretation of the activities of software development. We aren’t engineers in a giant, insubstantial locomotive. We’re people. Dealing with people.
Person → Teammate
Capitalism requires code switching. From the close of business one day to the start of business the next, we are parents, spouses, musicians, writers, runners, movie critics, comedians. Then when that whistle blows in the morning, we are instantly transformed into workers & teammates. Our individual goals & aspirations & skills are seconded to the team, to a degree & for a while.
I’m not going to guess which one of these sets of roles is Bruce Banner & which is The Hulk for you, but the transition between is painful. It may be the sort of pain we just get used to & so pretend it doesn’t exist, but it’s still there.
That’s what the standup meeting is there for—to give everyone a moment to say, “Oh, yeah, okay, these people & their needs are going to be important to me for the next 9 hours.” Take a breath. Get to work.
Different contexts will require different approaches to this transition. If the team is co-located & used to showing up at around the same time & pairs switch frequently & folks gather around the espresso maker most mornings, then maybe folks don’t need a ritual to manage the transition from person to worker. If the team is fully remote & in different timezones & just getting used to each other then likely yes, the need for ritual supporting the transition is greater (also harder because of the time shifts, which is why Mechanical Orchard teams tend to be organized by longitude).
At Gusto a group of us used to gather by the coffee machines & give everyone walking to their morning coffee a giant “woo woo” & an arm wave. If you’re looking for efficiency, that’s a damned efficient way to get folks out of “me” mode & into “us” mode. Doesn’t look great from a bits/person/second metric but hey metrics don’t tell the whole story.
Treating standup meetings as a technical solution to a technical problem—we need to communicate this many bits of information to this many people as efficiently as possible—misses the real point. We’re people. With needs. The better those needs are met, the better we can meet the needs of others.
This post resonates with me. We are not coding machines. We are people. People whose lives, in a healthy work situation, are bigger outside work than in it. And the condition of ourselves is important to the overall health of the team. Knowing that Bob's child is sick, or Sandy's mother just went into hospice can help other members of the team understand why Bob or Sandy is distracted today.
The most productive team i ever worked on started every stand-up with a check-in, going around the room with each person giving an indication of where their head is today. Some might say this was touchy feely crap. We found it helped the whole human be at work, and built a strong team. For this to work, leaders must show the way.
After check-in, we worked the stories, rather than the "what did you do yesterday..." form.
One super great improvement on one of project was to exhale managers from the standup. We had only developers, equal to each other, with intention to help, and we never judged anybody if there was no progress when someone stuck.
Although, it’s not necessary and can be solved in the different way, but teammates need to feel safe in such cases. Of presence of a manager slowly turns standup into the status report, it become less and less productive.