I'm a strong believer in having useful, short, productive meetings, in-person/video meetings for clarity and emotional connection, and making sure everything is well-documented. I value your time as well as my own, so each meeting starts and ends on time, and will be facilitated and have notes at the end. I also welcome longer one-off meetings! If there's something you need help with right now, please don't hesitate to throw something on my calendar.
I go more into this topic in-depth in this article
| Meeting | Length | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Stand up | 10 min, 3x week in person and/or Geekbot | Led by a rotating leader, status updates, bring up blockers, human connection |
| Weekly team sync | 30 min every week | Sprint planning, task planning, bring up blockers |
| Retrospective | 1 hour/month + async issue | Pulse on how we're doing and chance to improve iteratively. Can also be used for mid and end projects |
| Office hours | 30 min, 2x a month | Talk with external teams, open forum to answer questions about team's area of responsibility |
| Coffee talk | 30 min, 2x a month | Social time (optional) |
| Project kickoff | 1 hour, as needed | Project alignment across stakeholders and engineers, define roles, schedule, and next steps |
| Strategy or working sessions | 1 hour-3 hours, as needed | Workshopping ideas with room to explore and collaborate on ideas. Break sessions into 1 hour chunks with breaks |
| 1:1s | 30 min every week to 1 hour every week. Season to taste based on individual needs | Work on goals, human connection, provide feedback |
| Executive briefings | Variable | Bring executives up to speed on a project, be informed on company direction, bring up blockers |
1:1s are our time to work together on your career. They will always have agendas, have a space to add any additional emotional labor you're doing, and be a space for us to work on the next portion of your career. They are typically 30 min every week.
You can read more about my feelings on goals and 1:1s here and here
I will use these 1:1s to give you feedback, unblock you, work on your goals, and help you with anything that you need help with. I will take notes during these meetings so we remember what we worked on, but I encourage you to take your own notes as well!
We can work together to set a meeting cadence that works for us. Both of us have the ability to reschedule our 1:1 if the time doesn't work out.
Our daily standup is every day for ten minutes. It's led by that week's first responder (randomly assigned via PagerDuty), and we each go over:
- Any blockers
- What we worked on since the last standup
- What we're currently working on
We currently use Geekbot to facilitate our async stand ups, as many people have indicated that it's useful for them to list things down. I keep an eye on these async standups to:
- Check if anyone is blocked for an unreasonable amount of time
- Keep a general temperature check on things if people are stressed
- Stay informed if someone is in a different time zone
Geekbot should not be:
- A place to compare your status with other team member statuses! Different people have different projects with different scope - keep focused on your definition of "productive"
All members of the team are expected to attend/participate.
Our bi-weekly iterations are planning and sync meetings with the team and representatives from other teams we work with.
Every two weeks, we will meet to discuss:
- Work we are planning on doing
- Unusual metrics we've seen
- Statuses from the teams we work with
- Agenda items
- Deep dive presentations on topics of interest for the group
At the beginning every iteration, engineers should pick the work that they anticipate working on in the next two weeks from the On Deck column and assign themselves a project. It is not a requirement to finish the entire project, but it will help the team and external dependencies understand what to expect in the coming weeks.
All members of the team are expected to attend.
At the beginning of every month, an async retrospective issue will be opened in our repo. All members of the team (and guests!) are welcome to leave comments on the issue. On the last day of the month we have a 1 hour retrospective where we go over:
- What worked
- What could have been improved
- Action items for next time
A moderator sets up a board on FunRetro with the above categories. Teammates are allowed to vote on anything that resonates with them. Typically there are 3 minutes set aside for each category and about 10 minutes for discussion. The moderator takes notes in an issue in this repo, categorizes them, and adds the retrospective label.
All members of the team are expected to attend the synchronous retrospective.
Twice a month, we have open office hours for half an hour to an hour. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join us and ask questions regarding abuse vectors, product features, or just to hang out. We often invite guests from other companies to join us so we can learn from their processes.
All members of the team are encouraged to attend.
Twice a month (alternating with office hours) we have informal coffee talk for half an hour. It's completely optional for team members to attend, but highly encouraged so we can relax and get to know one another!
Slack should be used to coordinate development efforts. It is also a place to provide a bit of a virtual water cooler and connect more with each other. Also emoji. 🌴 💖 🚀
We have a public channel for work talk and a private channel for more sensitive topics.