5 ms·

Firstly, congrats on launching. Hard work is hard. I don't want to be negative on your launch day, but at the same time feedback is important. 1. I couldn't s

by vertis 4y ago

Firstly, congrats on launching. Hard work is hard. I don't want to be negative on your launch day, but at the same time feedback is important. 1. I couldn't see myself or the many agile/lean teams I've been part of using this. I don't feel enough of a burden when walking the board for this to be worth the money. 2. A user in spinach.io costs effectively the same amount as a user in Slack, the difference is that I'm going to use Slack all day every day and assuming the use of this tool it's a once a day task.[0] 3. Bringing 'intention' and 'structure' feels a little like it will become a straitjacket. 4. Moving talking during a standup to 'prep time' seems like it would remove any of the time benefits you're quoting. Worse that time would better be spent updating Jira/Trello/whatever, people don't do this reliably, so the prep becomes one more thing that doesn't get done. This is only one data point, and there is of course the classic "what do we need Dropbox for we have FTP" HN comment, so don't be disheartened either. As PG has said (paraphrased), one of the reasons to launch quickly is that you haven't really begun until you've launched. Having said that I'm happy to continue providing feedback as you iterate (my contact details are in my profile). [0]: Enterprise price point is incredibly hard. Got to get enough dollars to make it worthwhile, but that excludes smaller businesses like mine that feel like a death by a thousand cuts from all the SaaS subscriptions (I know you have a free plan).

talmi 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback, that's what we're looking for! The way we built the prep experience leverages previous tasks and goals and leverages our Jira integration which allows users to complete it in 1-2 minutes. The time saving you get by the whole team doing it is in many cases 10-20 minutes a day so well worth it. We're working on more features which leverage our Jira integration so eventually you'll be able to do everything you need during standup directly from Spinach in Zoom/Meet/Teams without having to use another app and/or screen share
Shindi 4y ago
Everyone take note, this is how you post constructive criticism on HN.
itake 4y ago
As an EM, I use documented standups to keep track of how long and when people work on tasks. When a person is under performing, this document is invaluable reference. When a person is exceeding expectations, this document helps me write their promo doc. This could could be useful to manage that data better, but currently I use a Google Doc sheet. That being said, I couldn't justify the cost of this tool to my manager when Google Docs does it well enough. Perhaps, this could be sold as a cost savings strategy for finding low performers?
- appletrotter 4y ago
  > As an EM, I use documented standups to keep track of how long and when people work on tasks. :(
- joshwillis2000 4y ago
  We're actually coming at it from the other side -- we built it to take the pain out of standup and encourage more meaningful communication. It's definitely not designed as a people management tool.
- vertis 4y ago
  It's disappointing that standups are used in this way. I don't know you and I don't know your team but this kind of approach to standups is probably wrecking your standups. The standup has it's roots in the agile manifesto[0] (gross simplification). Specifically "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". The coming together every day for just a few minutes is an opportunity to ask for help (blockers). Both the standup and to an even greater extent the retrospective are exercises in trust. I agree to show weakness and tell you and the team when I'm struggling with a task, or when things aren't going well, seeking continuous improvement. You agree not to use that against me. The sooner roadblocks and problems are discovered the less likely they are to become larger problems. This is one of the fundamental benefits of a standup. But this requires trust. Recording and documenting for the purposes of performance management is probably the number one way of destroying that trust. All of this means they're a very fragile beast. Prone to becoming exercises is puffery, or even worse a list of cards being worked on that you could just as easily get from the wall/Jira/trello. The team also succeeds or fails together, a much better way of dealing with employees that are struggling is to use pairing (sparingly) to ensure that anyone blocked on a task doesn't face it alone. Some things are just hard. I've got 20+ years of programming under my belt and I still manage to struggle at times. I've got the experience to work through this and ask for help where needed, but the earlier you are in your career the more imposter syndrome makes it desirable to crawl into a hole rather than ask for help. Standup in a great team helps break down those barriers. But only if a very fragile trust is maintained. [0]: https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/
dustedcodes 4y ago
You've shared many of my thoughts as well. Congrats on the launch, but from the website I even struggle to see what Spinach really does. I guess I have to watch the video to get a good impression, but "running standups" doesn't feel that complicated that the website couldn't be a bit more clear on which parts of a standup Spinach is going to help me with. I also wonder if this is something that engineers will enjoy. Feels more its targeted at Agile consultants and old school big corps. I don't know a single engineer who likes standups or agile, especially not if its "structured" as it's kind of the opposite of agile. EDIT: Also I never understood what the point is of a recorded standup history? To me that is a massive huge red flag and evidence that Scrum/Agile ceremonies are just a way for management to manage. It serves no purpose to the actual team. Yesterdays standup is completely irrelevant today. If there is still something important to discuss then it will be discussed today. It's actually quite counter productive to suggest that someone has to go through old notes to get informed about somethign they need to know. That is not in the spirit of what standups were originally meant to be.
SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
100% on “prep that doesn’t get done”. We have a slackbot at my place of work that asks people to do extremely quick updates for yesterday, today in lieu of the standup. Even getting people to consistently do that is an exercise.
- rukuu001 4y ago
  Yes. As a lead with a team spread across time zones, I’m constantly reminding (nagging) people to check in. I don’t want to have to corral people into a ‘least inconvenient’ meeting slot to get updates.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    This is because demanding that people spout what they did since yesterday is not how to manage humans. You need to engage with them. Call them up (voice ideally, but a slack DM thread is ok) and ask questions like they're another human being (not : what did you do since yesterday?).
    - rukuu001 4y ago
      > demanding that people spout what they did since yesterday is not how to manage humans Yeah I made it sound that way a bit right? Happy to say that's not what's happening. It's more that if I don't ask, they'll tend not to volunteer anything. We only have a few hours cross-over every day, and it's hard to generate a good sense of 'team!'
    - senko 4y ago
      > Call them up (voice ideally, but a slack DM thread is ok) and ask questions What? This is what developers hate the most. Leave me be, and I'll update you when there's something to update. A gentle slack nudge "remember to update trello/jira/post here/whatever" is fine since I can do that whatever. If you call me with "hey, how's it going" while I'm in the zone and holding 7 things in my mind, you've just ruined my day and wasted at least an hour of my time.
- icedchai 4y ago
mickimnet 4y ago
I completely second this! And I would like to extend the view from an Agile angle: In Scrum, the Daily Standup is to inspect and adapt to reach the Sprint goal. We always do a "Walk the board", where the complete team focus on what do we need to do, to get an item to progress towards done. Which is a discussion using the swarm intelligence. When only focusing on the (outdated) three questions (What have you done yesterday, what do you plan to do today and do you have any impediments), that not only feels like a status meeting, but also ignores the goal and collaboration.
- vertis 4y ago
  I work with lots of companies that have different variations. I have to agree my favourite daily/standup is a walk the board style. Often it's the retro where I spend a lot of time trying to encourage the team to do it "properly". I've had one that just wanted to do kumbaya sessions where they pat each other on the back for the last sprint. It feels great, but it's not what the retrospective was designed to work toward -- continuous improvement (Kaizen).

by vertis 4y ago

talmi 4y ago

Thanks for the feedback, that's what we're looking for! The way we built the prep experience leverages previous tasks and goals and leverages our Jira integration which allows users to complete it in 1-2 minutes. The time saving you get by the whole team doing it is in many cases 10-20 minutes a day so well worth it. We're working on more features which leverage our Jira integration so eventually you'll be able to do everything you need during standup directly from Spinach in Zoom/Meet/Teams without having to use another app and/or screen share

Shindi 4y ago

Everyone take note, this is how you post constructive criticism on HN.

itake 4y ago

As an EM, I use documented standups to keep track of how long and when people work on tasks. When a person is under performing, this document is invaluable reference. When a person is exceeding expectations, this document helps me write their promo doc. This could could be useful to manage that data better, but currently I use a Google Doc sheet. That being said, I couldn't justify the cost of this tool to my manager when Google Docs does it well enough. Perhaps, this could be sold as a cost savings strategy for finding low performers?

appletrotter 4y ago
> As an EM, I use documented standups to keep track of how long and when people work on tasks. :(
joshwillis2000 4y ago
We're actually coming at it from the other side -- we built it to take the pain out of standup and encourage more meaningful communication. It's definitely not designed as a people management tool.
vertis 4y ago
It's disappointing that standups are used in this way. I don't know you and I don't know your team but this kind of approach to standups is probably wrecking your standups. The standup has it's roots in the agile manifesto[0] (gross simplification). Specifically "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". The coming together every day for just a few minutes is an opportunity to ask for help (blockers). Both the standup and to an even greater extent the retrospective are exercises in trust. I agree to show weakness and tell you and the team when I'm struggling with a task, or when things aren't going well, seeking continuous improvement. You agree not to use that against me. The sooner roadblocks and problems are discovered the less likely they are to become larger problems. This is one of the fundamental benefits of a standup. But this requires trust. Recording and documenting for the purposes of performance management is probably the number one way of destroying that trust. All of this means they're a very fragile beast. Prone to becoming exercises is puffery, or even worse a list of cards being worked on that you could just as easily get from the wall/Jira/trello. The team also succeeds or fails together, a much better way of dealing with employees that are struggling is to use pairing (sparingly) to ensure that anyone blocked on a task doesn't face it alone. Some things are just hard. I've got 20+ years of programming under my belt and I still manage to struggle at times. I've got the experience to work through this and ask for help where needed, but the earlier you are in your career the more imposter syndrome makes it desirable to crawl into a hole rather than ask for help. Standup in a great team helps break down those barriers. But only if a very fragile trust is maintained. [0]: https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/

dustedcodes 4y ago

You've shared many of my thoughts as well. Congrats on the launch, but from the website I even struggle to see what Spinach really does. I guess I have to watch the video to get a good impression, but "running standups" doesn't feel that complicated that the website couldn't be a bit more clear on which parts of a standup Spinach is going to help me with. I also wonder if this is something that engineers will enjoy. Feels more its targeted at Agile consultants and old school big corps. I don't know a single engineer who likes standups or agile, especially not if its "structured" as it's kind of the opposite of agile. EDIT: Also I never understood what the point is of a recorded standup history? To me that is a massive huge red flag and evidence that Scrum/Agile ceremonies are just a way for management to manage. It serves no purpose to the actual team. Yesterdays standup is completely irrelevant today. If there is still something important to discuss then it will be discussed today. It's actually quite counter productive to suggest that someone has to go through old notes to get informed about somethign they need to know. That is not in the spirit of what standups were originally meant to be.

SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago

100% on “prep that doesn’t get done”. We have a slackbot at my place of work that asks people to do extremely quick updates for yesterday, today in lieu of the standup. Even getting people to consistently do that is an exercise.

rukuu001 4y ago
Yes. As a lead with a team spread across time zones, I’m constantly reminding (nagging) people to check in. I don’t want to have to corral people into a ‘least inconvenient’ meeting slot to get updates.
- dboreham 4y ago
  This is because demanding that people spout what they did since yesterday is not how to manage humans. You need to engage with them. Call them up (voice ideally, but a slack DM thread is ok) and ask questions like they're another human being (not : what did you do since yesterday?).
  - rukuu001 4y ago
    > demanding that people spout what they did since yesterday is not how to manage humans Yeah I made it sound that way a bit right? Happy to say that's not what's happening. It's more that if I don't ask, they'll tend not to volunteer anything. We only have a few hours cross-over every day, and it's hard to generate a good sense of 'team!'
  - senko 4y ago
    > Call them up (voice ideally, but a slack DM thread is ok) and ask questions What? This is what developers hate the most. Leave me be, and I'll update you when there's something to update. A gentle slack nudge "remember to update trello/jira/post here/whatever" is fine since I can do that whatever. If you call me with "hey, how's it going" while I'm in the zone and holding 7 things in my mind, you've just ruined my day and wasted at least an hour of my time.
icedchai 4y ago

mickimnet 4y ago

I completely second this! And I would like to extend the view from an Agile angle: In Scrum, the Daily Standup is to inspect and adapt to reach the Sprint goal. We always do a "Walk the board", where the complete team focus on what do we need to do, to get an item to progress towards done. Which is a discussion using the swarm intelligence. When only focusing on the (outdated) three questions (What have you done yesterday, what do you plan to do today and do you have any impediments), that not only feels like a status meeting, but also ignores the goal and collaboration.

vertis 4y ago
I work with lots of companies that have different variations. I have to agree my favourite daily/standup is a walk the board style. Often it's the retro where I spend a lot of time trying to encourage the team to do it "properly". I've had one that just wanted to do kumbaya sessions where they pat each other on the back for the last sprint. It feels great, but it's not what the retrospective was designed to work toward -- continuous improvement (Kaizen).