Season 1 - Episode 3 : Setting Your Company Cadence

It's a proven fact that people work best when they have a consistent routine. For your startup, this can be an incredibly powerful tool to create a highly productive team. In this episode, we'll talk about how we used Scrum to build a cadence to our team and their work that helped us stay on track.

Background Story

Routines are important for everyone, and your employees are no exception. Consistent touchpoints and opportunities for collaboration are crucial to your success. That said, it’s not always a natural lesson for many founders. It took us a long time to understand that we needed to establish consistency in our staff’s workday for them to truly thrive. At our startup, AppArmor, we slowly implemented new touchpoints which we believe were very important in our culture.

Outline

There were three touchpoints that we opted to focus on for this episode:

1. The Morning Scrum: Our morning standing meeting

2. Daily Office Hours: Mid day problem solving.

3. Spring Planning: An update on the awesome stuff we were building.

We also had an unofficial fourth “meeting”: our 4pm Friday Social Hour.

Busted Myth

• Myth: That you don’t need to explicitly establish a routine for your staff to be successful. It doesn’t matter how great a leader you are, you need structure for your people to get the most out of them.

Learnings

• The Morning Scrum Meeting

  • The three questions each person had to answer: What did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, and are you stuck on anything? It helped highlight that folks could get help across departments and kept the company on task. Everyone had a maximum of 30 seconds to answer the three questions.

  • It started to get too long, so there was a natural evolution to "highlights". It condensed the questions as the answers sometimes become repetitive day over day.

  • Pros: since the meeting was at 9am every day, it also enforced punctuality norms in our culture. We always knew when someone was late! Also the entire company became aware of what you were working on. It also encouraged people to ask for help when they needed it.

  • Cons: Sometimes people spoke too long, and it sometimes got boring.  

  Daily Office Hours

  • Think a university professor. We wanted to have a time when any staff could meet with subject matter experts on a given topic (SME). We made office hours at the same time for everyone across the company and used breakout rooms to support smaller groups of people.

  • Pros: This avoided interruptions throughout the entire day (particularly for support and development teams). Broadly, it encouraged learning and information sharing and even created an opportunity for the staff to "hang out" even if working remotely.

  • Cons: Blocked an hour of the day for most people that couldn't be used for other meetings and some managers thought it was a wasteful use of time (it wasn’t).

  Sprint Planning Meetings (Demo new stuff)

  • As part of the Scrum process, we used the sprint planning meeting to not only plan what was coming but to also show what had recently been built. That is, we used the meeting to demo new features to the entire company.  It was an effective way to keep everyone up to speed and gave developers a chance to show off what they'd built. 

  • Pros: Gets everyone together to celebrate the new features we'd built for our platform.  Offered a good learning opportunity where staff could hear about and question the features by the people that actually built them.

  • Cons: Big meeting - so expensive from a productivity standpoint.  And sometimes developers aren't the best at explaining the "benefit" from the features that they built - they talk more about "what" it does, not "why".  

  Social Hour

  • Every week we’d take the last hour of the work week and socialize for fun.

  • It was mandatory - you couldn’t leave - your options were work or socialize. Sometimes we called it “mandated company fun” but everyone got into it.

  • During the covid years, we introduced a half hour version for the folks online.

Summary

• Routines are important

• You don’t want them to be annoying, but they should be frequent. Solicit feedback to further refine these touchpoints.

• The sooner you implement them, the better. It will help you keep touchpoints going long term.