from Gergely Orosz | by Gergely Orosz

Q: "What are your thoughts about standup meetings and how they should be conducted in a scrum team? How can engineers make these meetings effective?" A: My view has changed dramatically on standups over the years, from "we must have them" to "well...". A thread + resources: t.co/gtRfncFkCo

1. IF you have a standup meeting (usually, daily), make it SHORT. This means don't have more than the minimum necessary people, stick to the point, and take longer discussions for after the meeting. All of this made sense in the office, but with remote, things change a lot:

2. IF you have sync standup meetings as a remote team, the very least have some sort of agenda document that people can fill out ahead of time. It makes the meeting more focused, discussions easier to follow (or catch up on). Here's a template I created: t.co/eJrR5UBHOK t.co/Yno7d09CBX

3. IF you have a doc that goes with the standup... do you *really* need to have in-person standups with the team? Can you not just fill it out by a certain time, and everyone reviews it? Most my teams at Uber ended up doing this, and meeting in sync only a few times per week.

4. I've come to realize, as a manager how *I* think team standups should be run are not always the most efficient. I've started to encourage project leads to have full autonomy to decide what they want to do. Guess what - these templates and async standups came from them!

5. Here is my philosophy on team leads & why I decided to rotate project leadership among team members. It comes with a document on what I expected from project leads for output, but without specifying the "how". Here's what that doc says about standups: t.co/o8ERTbHIdy t.co/j7DSIzK4yN

6. One last thought on scrum. I used to do scrum "by the book" at Skype in 2012-2014. Never did it since, and my teams worked just as good. Here's why I don't think scrum matters (at all, to be honest), but what other things make projects successful: t.co/c6gdPu0KKM