Interrogate your meetings' junk

What’s the purpose of your daily standup meeting? “Getting everyone in sync and identifying and mitigating blockers, of course.” Well, good, you’ve done your homework.

Soooooooo why’s another team’s PM a regular attendee? And your boss? And what’s up with the icebreaker that comes after the meeting every single time, or the spreadsheet that another manager uses to coordinate all the check-ins? And if we’re prioritizing the team getting in sync, why’s this all feel like we’re more concerned with doing upward reporting as sorted by Jira card?

Meetings accumulate stuff. From a first-order point of view, this is needless cruft and wants for cutting, so we prescribe things like No Meetings Without Agendas and then proceed rapidly to Destroy All Meetings. And this isn’t without merit—this accumulated Other Stuff generally isn’t why a given meeting, ceremony, or whatnot exists.

But we’re doing these things for a reason—and it’s worth interrogating your meetings’ junk before just tossing it.

A client I worked with had a half-hour long (or longer!) icebreaker at the tail end of their daily stand-up every single day. Whoa! That’s not what a standup meeting is for! But it did have a purpose: a team that was full of extroverts needed that time to have a human connection every day before going heads-down on their code or they’d burn out. And instead of burning out, they grew closer and found ways to work together more effectively. That time wasn’t free, and it most likely attached to the standup because it’s hard to ask for a half hour to play games together in isolation—but it was well worthwhile from an outsider’s perspective.

Before “trimming the fat”, ask how it got there: is there a need for more trust from leadership, hence pressure to report upward? Are there breaks in inter-team comms that need addressing explicitly? Or is some ritualistic habit truly puzzling and just needs to go?

(But then, yes, slim down your meetings to have explicit purposes and stick to them, please.)