Do you ask your team how things are going?
I've worked for Fortune 500 companies and small startups as an embedded engineer and full-time team member. One thing that always struck me as odd across the board is how risk and team morale is assessed.
Standups
Standups are hit or miss. I've participated in ones that are a daily waste of time and others that helped move things forward. The thing about standups is they are:
- Typically verbal, so harder to accurately pass the information along if needed
- Easy to misinterpret the severity of issues
- Harder to identify systemic problems (issues over time)
1:1s
These tend to get a little deeper but once again have their issues.
- Very difficult to pass along information
- Hit or miss, in terms of value, depending on the format.
- Harder to identify systemic problems (issues over time)
We're building a product that helps solve common problems with higher-level product strategy and discovery management (a topic for another time). We're currently in private beta and working with teams to make their product strategy and discovery process more efficient.
As we worked with teams, some themes kept coming up.
- Are we properly tracking towards our goal?
- How does the team feel about progress and the goal?
- What are the risks?
We decided to help solve this within our product because this sentiment is crucial when evaluating product direction. Here's a quick write-up that contains more of the why and how we approached it.
If you do something like this within your product team, I'd love to hear more about it. Please reach out.
