Stand-up Meetings are Dead (and what to do instead)

This resource first appeared in issue #98 on 29 Oct 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Meetings

Stand-up Meetings are Dead (and what to do instead) - Ben Darfler, Honeycomb Blog

What if daily standups, but for an hour?

Darfler describes how Honeycomb has switched their standups - from the usual short round-table format to a daily hour long gathering (a “meandering team sync”) that includes social time, and then a collaboratively-edited catch all agenda of work items. Rather than being formulaic, it becomes the standard place for team-wide discussions (technical or process) and also explicitly includes a social component. Darfler finds that it reduces total meeting time by always providing a venue for discussion of any given topic (much the way regularly-scheduled one-on-ones typically reduce interruptions - for both team member and manager - by providing a bucket for topics to go into). Darfler recommends starting with 30 minutes to see how it goes.

The point to take from this, I think, is that there’s no single way to run team meetings. Almost any meeting format can work for a team as long as there’s regular check-ins about the success of the meeting format and opportunities for course correction. I’m not sure our team would switch to this format any time soon, but it’s an interesting idea and I’d be curious to see how it worked in our community.

What sorts of meeting rituals do you use in your team? Do you have anything other than the weekly staff meeting and sprint rituals like standups, sprint planning, and retros? What’s worked well for your team (and alternatively, what did not work?)