Setting your Company Cadence
It's a proven fact that people work best when they have a consistent routine. For your startup, a reliable cadence can be an incredibly powerful tool to create a highly productive team. In this post, we'll talk about how we used Scrum to build daily and weekly cadences for our team and their work that helped us stay on track.
When managing a company cadence, you’re balancing ensuring work is happening with micromanagement. That is, you don’t want to be a burden to your staff, but you also want to set them up for success. This is an iterative process; like building the MVP for a product, you’ll want to build, measure, and learn when you implement a new cadence for your team.
Let’s start with the start: the morning scrum meeting. Every morning our team members would have a meeting at 9 am sharp and have to answer three questions: What did you do yesterday, today, and what are you stuck on? We picked 9am because we wanted to ensure our people were up and going at the same time as our customers. The meeting ensured people were (mostly) there in the morning to move the business forward.
I know what you’re thinking and yes, sometimes people spoke too long and it got boring. Over time, this meeting shifted from the the three questions to highlights and needs. We also put a time limit on the updates so that we could keep the meeting to 15 minutes; it was meant to be informative, quick, and support inter-departmental collaboration.
Generally it worked well. It helped folks stay on time, made the entire company aware of what someone was working on and encouraged people to ask for help when they needed it.
A quick post-scrum selfie in the AppArmor Offices
Then there was daily Office Hours. Basically we made office hours at the same time for everyone across the company so that team members could get help. It didn’t matter if it was sales, customer support, or product related - team members could use office hours to get the help they needed to get unstuck.
It was a great tool for avoiding interruptions throughout the entire day. It also encouraged learning and information sharing that otherwise wouldn’t happen. And when Office Hours were quiet, it also created an opportunity for the staff to "hang out" even if working remotely. While it did block an hour of the day for most people that couldn't be used for other meetings, it was unquestionably a good use of time. Team members felt more empowered and by extension we were able to help our customers much faster.
Last but not least was the Sprint Planning or “Demo New Stuff” meetings. In this meeting developers would demo new features to the entire company. It was an effective way to keep everyone up to speed on new feature and bug releases and gave developers a chance to show off what they'd built. The team could celebrate the new features built for the platform and also promoted learning opportunities where staff could ask questions about features by the people that actually built them.
The drawbacks were that it was a big meeting. It was expensive from a productivity standpoint. We were careful to limit the length of the meeting to mitigate the cost.
Woo! Cadence is crucial to setting up your team for success . Check out our episode on the topic to hear directly from Dave and Chris. They mention a few bonus cadences that were important to AppArmor's different approach.
Until next time!
-The Startup Different Team