Sprint 14 :: Boring Stand-Ups & ways to make them fun

One of the regular activities of any product manager and development teams are stand-up meetings - daily, weekly or bi-weekly.

This is a time for updates, sharing feedback, analyzing difficulties or blockers and possible solutions or things to improve. The problem? When done daily, it's hard not to fall into a repetitive and tiring routine.

Some of the reasons that can make stand-up meetings negatively interfere with the productivity of a team are:

• Updates that have nothing to do with your work

  • Pros: General view of everything that is being done

  • Cons: You feel lost in the conversation

• Too long

• Scheduling and time zone conflicts

• And more..

For these reasons, you need to make the most of every meeting and make sure everyone has a good time!

I will now share some ideas and suggestions of things we can do to get the whole team involved and break the routine!

Icebreaker to start

• Let's not immediately focus on work and boring stufff, there are many quick things we can do to break the ice at the beginning of each meeting:

  1. Funny work related Jokes or Memes: Link

  2. Riddles: Link

  3. On this day in History: Link

Rubrics made by everyone

• Have a weekly rubric where everyone on the team can contribute

  1. Culture club (specially good when you have team members worldwide - the goal here is to share a movie, a book, a song or something characteristic of your country or city and share traditions of other cultures) 🌍

  2. Tech Fun Facts: Challenge everyone to share a Tech Fun Fact

Positive view

• Focus on what went well and what went wrong, using negative examples to learn from.

• A great challenge is to gather all the bad things and take something positive out of it, be it a bug, a failed release or a broken keyboard!

Keep your stand-ups short and focused

• Focus on the relevant issues/topics using three guiding questions:

  1. What did you accomplish yesterday/today? 

  2. What are you doing today/tomorrow?

  3. What roadblocks did you encounter?

Ready to make your stand-ups more fun? 😎

The Product Land ⛰️

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