Standups with Meaning

I’m a big fan of Agile methodology. I love the idea that you share every piece of your work with your peers and stakeholders as soon as it’s shareable, not waiting until it’s polished and stale. I love the idea of communicating early, often, and reliably. And I’m especially enamored of the transparency that comes with Agile.

My favorite Agile ritual is the daily standup. It’s my daily chance to understand how things are going on the project, make sure everyone is unblocked and working together, and see people I respect and admire.

At JPL, when I joined a little over 6 years ago, I only knew of one team using Agile. I brought it to every project I have worked on, and other people started evangelizing as well. Now, I can’t even tell you how many teams are using it. I don’t even know all the teams using Agile at JPL.

So many of us are spread across multiple projects. You bill your time to a project, so that the tax payers have full accountability for everything we do. And when you’re just one line item in a massive budget, you often get sliced and diced. I bill 50% of my time to Europa Clipper, 50% to Europa Lander, 10% to the Deep Space Network, 10% to management time, 10% or so to miscellaneous small projects that deserve UX help but can’t afford to pay for a full member of the team.

Yes, that adds up to more than 100%, which means Clipper and Lander usually don’t get a full 50% billing — but that’s the dance of JPL. We are all spread thin, all working on a billion worthy things. That’s what makes standups both critical for our success AND a huge burden.

Because if I were to have one meeting for each project each day, you can see that half of my day would be meetings only. In reality, the nature of UX work is that we have a lot more than one meeting for each project a day. There are SME interviews, user tests, design reviews, project status meetings, working meetings… it can end up being 9 hours of meetings in a day, if you’re not careful. And I’m not alone. Everyone I work with is in the same situation, but on different projects that may or may not overlap with or even be related to mine.

This is why standups are so critical to our success. When I’m context-switching from hour to hour, snatching work time when I can (I’ll talk about that in a future post about time management) and interfacing with 4–6 different core teams, it’s a lot like being in an agency. In order to make it work, I’ve got to do two things:

1. I need to know what is going on in the other parts of the project so I can blend my work into it.
2. I need to build relationships with my colleagues, so we can trust and rely on each other.

Daily standups by their very nature achieve the first of those two things. It’s why we have them. As long as they’re crisp (try to keep your standups to 15 minutes) you get a TON of bang for your buck on this time.

The second one is not so easy. How do you build strong, individual relationships with 6–8 people in a total of 15 minutes a day?

I’ve learned two really amazing techniques for that, and having used them for quite some time now I can tell you that they work. They don’t just work, the WORK. I’m gonna share them with you now.

Tip 1: On the last day of your work week, add an additional element to your status.

I learned this from Dr. Alexandra Holloway, my work bestie and sometimes research partner. She’s a damn genius. She started this tradition when we worked on the Deep Space Network and I’ve extended it to every project since.

Every day we answer the usual standup questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• Are you blocked?

On the last working day of the week (that alternates Thursdays and Fridays for us, since we get every other Friday off) we add a very important question.

• What are you going to do to take good care of yourself this weekend?

This is important for so many reasons.

First, the people you are working with are human beings with needs and lives outside your project. As a member of the scrum team, you need to realize that. When bad things happen outside work, it may affect their work. When good things happen outside work, that can affect their work too. And burnout is a real danger that costs people. If you want a strong, performing team, you need to know that your team members are fully realized individuals whose experiences will bleed into the team and change the whole team’s chemistry.

Second, it reminds people to think about their own well-being. It’s a sad state of affairs that we need to be reminded to participate in self-care, but it’s a reality. It’s good to build in this regular nudge, to keep our hearts and minds healthy.

Third, it allows the team to understand ways in which they might bond outside work. You discover common interests. You get tips for great restaurants. I’ve seen friendships form because two people both realized they were musicians, and now they have jam sessions together. Look at the magic of a single question.

Tip 2: One additional question a day makes a huge impact.

This one I learned from Kenny Roffo. He’s a developer on one of my projects. I met him when he was an intern, and have had the pleasure of working with him on Europa Lander. He thinks of himself as junior, because he just graduated a year or two ago. But I’m going to tell you right now that guy is someday going to be a household name. He’s brilliant.

Kenny is one of those people who leads with his heart. My kind of human. He is the most sincere, kind person you’ll ever meet. And he’s a hell of a developer to boot. Back in June, he made a suggestion that blew my mind. We adopted it right away and it’s made a huge difference.

In addition to the three usual daily standup questions, we also ask:

• What’s your stress level on a scale of 1–10?

Now, this might seem a little tree-huggy to you at first. Bear with me.

Stressed out team members don’t necessarily make the best decisions. They work fast under pressure, but they might also work sloppy. They might forget to do the little things like communicating or asking for help. They might also feel like they’re vulnerable or at risk. It’s not productive. And it’s a road to burnout if nothing else.

From a humanist perspective, you want to know when your team members are feeling under the gun. You might be able to help. Sometimes just being able to say that they’re feeling a stress level of 9 helps. They’ve gotten a chance to express it out loud, and it drops down a notch. Or maybe just half a notch, but it’s enough to make it bearable.

And even if you can’t help, you can empathize. When your developer is feeling a 9 and he doesn’t get back to your Slack message right away, it makes more sense. If your designer is feeling an 8 and doesn’t respond to a critique with warm acceptance, you know why.

Knowing the stress level of your team can help you understand the ebbs and flows that go into your work. When the whole team is stressed at the 9s for weeks on end, you know that you’re doing something wrong. When peoples’s stress goes up and down you know you’re doing something right, especially if it’s going up and down within a reasonable range.

Now go do it.

As professionals we’re always looking for the little things that make a big difference. The small investments with big wins. These are two. It will literally cost you maybe 3 additional minutes a day but it’ll benefit in person-years of productivity. Team members will work better together, stick around longer, and be more reliable. And you’ll love your work more a little every day, because you care about people and people care about you.

So go do them already! And tell me how it goes.