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I challenge PMs and leads to do a project, maybe just a small one, where you don't hold a group meeting even once over the course of the project. I've led a 9

I challenge PMs and leads to do a project, maybe just a small one, where you don't hold a group meeting even once over the course of the project. I've led a 9 month project building an entire SaaS project this way. It was definitely hard work making sure my tickets were in good order, that i had a good design feedback loop with the designer (really just the CEO plopping components into figma), and that I had another feedback loop with the engineers (of which I was also one in this case) so we could accurately predict what would get done when. The tools were relatively simple: figma for designs, linear for tickets, slack for messaging. This is across several time zones with differences up to 12 hours. I found that by using our tools well we were able to get a good product delivered in good time at good cost, with good quality of life for all involved. I used to hate standups and think "well, I guess it's probably making someone else's job easier?" Sure, it was making the product manager's job of reporting what was happening to their boss easier. But turns out, maybe that can be supplanted by using your tools well. When will the xyz feature be done? Looks like middle of sprint based on estimates. It seems so simple I don't really know if we just got lucky this one time or what, but this was across nearly a whole year and such a big project I kinda feel like we hit upon something with our method.

vidarh 4y ago
I've been on "all" sides of that table, and I've had teams where I had to force daily calls to get people to stay focused, and teams where I could chase people individually, but the aggregate amount of team members time I've needed to spend to stay up to date have tended to stay relatively similar. Key thing being, if your standup is a large proportion of the time you spend closing those feedback loops, it's likely your standups are much to long or your one on one follow-up may be on the low side. But there are also all kinds of exceptions - a team of very senior people who know each other can often do with less, for example. Lest you think I like meetings, one of the most effective "meeting killers" I put in place at a past team was a weekly report where I got HR to give me average salary numbers across the different job functions and added up the salary cost per work item, with meetings broken out. The number of meetings plummeted when people saw the opportunity cost in dollars as a proportion of salaries to put a dozen engineers in a room for an hour. I absolutely loathe pointless meetings. But it's important to be aware of what function a given meeting actually serves before deciding whether or not it's pointless.

vidarh 4y ago

I've been on "all" sides of that table, and I've had teams where I had to force daily calls to get people to stay focused, and teams where I could chase people individually, but the aggregate amount of team members time I've needed to spend to stay up to date have tended to stay relatively similar. Key thing being, if your standup is a large proportion of the time you spend closing those feedback loops, it's likely your standups are much to long or your one on one follow-up may be on the low side. But there are also all kinds of exceptions - a team of very senior people who know each other can often do with less, for example. Lest you think I like meetings, one of the most effective "meeting killers" I put in place at a past team was a weekly report where I got HR to give me average salary numbers across the different job functions and added up the salary cost per work item, with meetings broken out. The number of meetings plummeted when people saw the opportunity cost in dollars as a proportion of salaries to put a dozen engineers in a room for an hour. I absolutely loathe pointless meetings. But it's important to be aware of what function a given meeting actually serves before deciding whether or not it's pointless.