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, “what are you planning to do today?”
I don’t need to hear everyone on the team reiterate everything they did in the last 24 hours. Likewise, I don’t need them to repeat their upcoming “task list.” Both of those questions are a total waste of time.
Instead, I want to know what they are thinking. I want to know what my team needs.
And if nobody needs anything, then let’s get back to work.
I have two questions that I want everyone to think about during my standup:
What could we be doing better?
How can I, or anyone else in the room, help you out?
I make sure the team knows that’s what a standup is all about. I usually mention each question at least once in each standup — but I don’t robotically call on everyone.
Instead, I kick things off by touching base with the team. Maybe someone has been working on a tough problem. I’ll start with them, by asking, “Steve, do you have everything you need to solve that security issue? Is there anything we can do to help?” It’s a conversation about providing support — not distrust and task assignment.
As the moderator, I’ll make sure we do not spiral. We don’t use the standup to fix the problem — we use it to focus attention. The moment someone starts to get technical, to discuss or diagnose a problem, I stop them: “Awesome, sounds like Monica can help you out. Steve, you two are free to go. The rest of us will finish up the standup.”
If anyone else has been working through a tough problem, I’ll be sure they’ve spoken up before we’re done — with a gentle prompt, if needed. I prefer the standup to be self-directed, each team member taking their own turn and voluntarily answering the questions, in their own way. One way to do that is to have team members call on one another when they finish.
Before I dismiss everyone, I’ll make sure to ask, at least once, “is there anything we could be doing better?”
And if nobody else has something to add, we adjourn and get back to work. Most often, we’re done in less than 10 minutes.
Standups are not about “PM work.” They aren’t about status reporting. Standups are expensive because they tie up the whole team — and that means they need to create extreme value.
It’s amazing to see the difference this kind of standup brings to a team. It puts control in the team’s hands. It gives them agency. It drives morale. You’ll see it in how your team interacts — with self-direction, accountability and action.
Create intention behind your retros, too
Just like standups need to bring value, so do retrospectives.
We’ve all seen bad sprints. Sprint goals blow up with hidden complexity. Outside events creep in, slowing the team down. Everything we planned on delivering turns into a mess and we deliver nothing. The demo is a disaster because we can’t even show one modest feature working right.
Even great teams have a bad sprint. The difference is what you do about it.
I’ve seen too many teams skipping retros simply because they don’t actually create any value. A poorly run retro has no intention, no purpose. They become blame games or gripe sessions — and beyond that, nothing comes of them.
Instead, plan your retros around the value you want them to bring. A good retro:
Is part of your continuous improvement program.
Tells you what you can do better next time.
Every sprint needs to end with a retro (right after the sprint demo) — otherwise, your continuous improvement chain isn’t happening.
I have three questions I ask my team during my retros:
What was the hardest part?
What did we learn?
What should we do differently next time?
That’s it — no blame, no scolding, no posturing or politics. The retro is a safe place for the team to process what happened and then engage in the future.
My promise to the team: it’s a forum for self-governance. The decisions we make in the retro become part of our operating model. It becomes my job to make sure we follow up on our promises to ourselves.
Never lose sight of the intention behind action
Every ceremony you introduce needs to have intention. In that intention is the hidden value behind the ceremony.
That value needs to exceed the cost of the ceremony. Bringing the whole team together is costly. It interrupts the team, taking them away from valuable work. Make it worth their while.
Make your daily standups and sprint retros valuable. Use them as a way to empower your team, create agency and solve the tough problems — not which security protocol to use; instead, who can help solve the problem. Don’t waste your team’s time rehashing a bad demo; instead, ask them, “what should we do differently next time?”
Then, make sure you do it.