Although the frequency, length and details may vary, there are some regular gatherings which I think are fundamental to building and maintaining “flow” in a high functioning software team. Here is my list of essential cycle meetings:
- Grooming – Triage new tasks from your inbox (your task inbox, I mean). Assign all tasks a priority, and sort into backlog or active development flow. If there are no inbound tasks, review backlogs in priority order, closing or refining tasks only. Grooming can be a PM solo activity, a team leads activity, or open to the full team. Generally, it’s a waste of most people’s time, though. But for PMs and team flow, it is vital.
- Planning – I prefer to do this weekly, but bi-weekly can work. This is the core team meeting. You can use it to review planned work, or work in progress. This is also the forum for longer presentations and proposals, and to have medium scale planning discussions. Always track action items and decisions, or have someone who does.
- Stand-ups or Syncs – Short meetings to discuss the state of work and identify any blockers to progress. Lots of people like the “yesterday, today, blockers” standup format, where each team member gives a very brief overview of their work yesterday, today and brings up anything blocking their progress on current or upcoming tasks. Slightly longer sync meetings can also be useful. In that format the focus is often on the board and the progress of priority tasks, and burn-down, rather than team member status. This is particularly useful if deadlines are looming or as complex products, features or releases are in the “coming together” phase.
- Retros – Facilitated discussions of the good, the bad and the ugly. If your group or organization doesn’t have people who can act as facilitators (scrum masters, project managers, etc), be sure to use a standard format, to avoid the temptation to monopolize the conversation, or play the process “by ear”, and thus bias it. The most important meeting if you want to improve the team, yourself or your product.
- Walk-throughs – Walk throughs are a way for the team to “walk in the shoes of the user” together and collectively identify issues. This is especially good for improving “polish” and usability quality, but isn’t necessary for day-to-day changes. See this essay which gets into detail about this process.
- 1:1s – have at least 30 minute 1:1 with each team member and key partners or stakeholders every week or two. Always have something prepared to talk about, even if its social, but always defer to the other persons agenda, if they have one. Good meetings to have walking, drinking or eating.