Transform your standups and retros: intention matters more than status updates
Do you try to skip your standup? Or feel like retros are a waste of time? Then your team isn’t doing it right. Here's my formula for giving your team agency and getting real value from both.
A daily standup is a great idea — provided it’s done right.
A well-run standup:
Is a place to foster collaboration and mindshare.
Provides a forum to get help.
Makes sure the team doesn’t spiral.
Unfortunately, most standups that I join don’t do any of these things. Quite the opposite. These standups impede productive work, acting as a needless interruption that offers almost no value.
More often than not what I see is a team forced to stand together while each team member robotically itemizes their work since the last sprint. In some miserable cases, the “PM” and one or two team members hold the entire team hostage while a specific problem is diagnosed.
The standup stretches to 30 or 40 minutes. Your eight person team takes a cumulative five hour hit to their productivity.
Create value in your standups
If you Google “questions to ask at a standup” you’ll find the worst culprit sitting right at the top of the list: “what did you do since yesterday?”
Ban this question.
Almost just as bad is, “wha…
