Sometimes people think I’m anti-meeting. But I’m not. I think meetings serve a useful purpose. My goal is simply to make them not suck.
Take the daily stand up. The three tentpoles of that meeting are:
👉 What did you do yesterday?
👉 What did you do today?
👉 What’s blocking you?
All critical questions. But they can be addressed asynchronously, before the meeting.
When you do this, everyone comes to the meeting already informed about status. This allows you to focus the entire meeting around the roadblocks. Or on course correcting. Everything can be about moving the ball forward.
Compare that to two team members going back and forth on the status of Jira ticket 1471, while everyone else “stands” there, checked out and scrolling elsewhere, forever hating this meeting.
One of the key principles of the Agile Manifesto is “individuals and interactions.” Interactions are great. But status updates don’t need to be one of those interactions.
