Standup meetings

What is a standup meeting

Standup meetings are used by teams to revise yesterday's work and plan for the day together. These were popularised by agile & scrum methodologies in large tech companies. The way it works is pretty simple, in theory:

• All team members come together at a pre-defined recurring slot (usually daily, maybe weekly)
• Everyone gives their updates for the day, and calls out any blockers they have or help they need for achieving today's tasks.
• A usual question set for a daily standup meeting looks like this -

How to run a good standup meeting

We have exhaustively run about this topic before, and the following guides should be useful:

• Templates for daily standup meetings
• Weekly status reports meeting template

But if I was to summarise the best tips to run a standup meeting, I would recommend that you:

• Don't call for meetings in the first place - Yup you heard me right! The best way to run daily standup meetings is completely asynchronous using text based project management tools. We wrote more about it here.
• Make them inclusive - A lot of times, the most vocal people in a standup meeting are the extroverts who have been around in the team for a long time. They feel most comfortable raising their voices, and hence the voice of the shy ones gets smothered down. You have to work hard to ensure that this doesn't happen.
• Ensure people come fully prepped in advance - I absolutely hate it when people don't send their updates in advance. It's a huge waste of time if everyone uses their allotted time to simply read out their bullet points.
• Use tools to automate status update collection - If you use daily standup bots on Slack to automate some of these daily routines, it not only saves time but also makes it easier for everyone to highlight their blockers. You get to spend more time helping your team move forward vs admin work.