Some experts tell that asynchronous communication is the future of the work. Other leaders say that we can’t refuse synchronous communication. Who’s right? 

In this article, you will find a complete guide on different ways of team communication and practical examples. 

Here are the main topics of the article:

• Communication challenges for remote teams
• Synchronous vs Asynchronous communication
  • What is synchronous communication?
  • What is asynchronous communication?
  • Pros and cons of synchronous communication
  • Pros and cons of asynchronous communication
• Best practices for synchronous communication
• Best practices for asynchronous communication
• Tools for synchronous and asynchronous communication
• How to use both types of communication

The main goal of this article is to give you best practices and examples of effective communication to increase productivity in your team.

The story about Mike

To understand better what should you use, let me tell you a short story. 

Meet Mike – a software developer in a tech company. He is a nice guy who loves to solve interesting projects.

He should deploy a new feature today – create a new onboarding process. He started to work on it in the morning. He is closed to complete the first piece of work – creating a database structure. 

At that moment, Mary is calling him.

She asks Mike to extend the plan to one of the clients who want to test their product before payment. It doesn’t take a lot of time and Mike helps. Mary is happy. 

Mike comes back to his main work. It takes some time to remember his last step and the main issue he tried to solve. 

He doesn’t manage to finish the first part of work because of the team meeting at noon. He jumps on a Zoom call to discuss current challenges with the engineering team.  

The meeting takes more time than he expected. He plans to continue his work after lunch. 

Fortunately, he finishes the database structure after lunch. It’s time to write backend logic for the new feature. 

Suddenly his manager Derrick is calling him. Their main clients requested to develop the new feature and it’s the main priority now. Erick explains to him how it should work and asks him when Mike will finish the current task to start working on this new feature.

Mike has a new deadline to finish the initial task. Anxiety is growing because he understands that he will not deploy the new onboarding in a time-bound manner. He is still working on the second part of this feature.

He tried to learn more about time management but it didn’t help him. He often doesn’t complete his work in a time-bound manner.

The end of the story. 

Communication challenges for remote teams

The real problem with Mike is not his time management skills. It’s about communication. 

Remote teams are facing main communication challenges:

• Loneliness and lack of human interaction. It’s not a direct communication challenge. However, it’s important to mention that if you don’t have a lot of friends or family members, it’s easy to feel isolated. 

How to solve it? 

If you feel lonely, try to work from cafes or cowering spaces. Also, participate in different evening events to meet new people. 

• Interruptions: coworkers, family, pets, etc. 
  It’s mostly the problem of synchronous communication. And we will talk about it later.

• Misunderstanding. 
  Remote work requires extra communication. It’s easy to misunderstand what your coworkers said in a messenger.

How to solve it?

Clarifying everything. Be proactive in speaking up. And make it a habit in your team.

• Wrong communication processes 

Marcelo Lebre wrote a great article on why companies should be working asynchronously 

Usually, companies work synchronously where you do everything step by step. The main bottleneck of the waterfall process defines by the weakest part. Total speed depends on the speed of the slowest process in the workflow. 

It’s the waterfall way of product development. To finish the work, a team should complete 3 projects step by step (A, B, C).

He showed that by separating tasks A, B, and C in (A1, A2, A3, B1, etc.) they achieved three times as many deploys as in the previous example. This methodology allows them to multiplex tasks, combining them to produce results faster.

And the communication was a crucial part of their improvement at work. Meetings are one of the expensive tools in the company and you should use them wisely. 

And here is the common way of communication in a remote team. Developers are distracted in the meeting and real-time communication. As the result, their productivity is low.

In this example, communication is based on good documentation and text answers. It increases efficiency.

Let’s talk about 2 types of communication.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous communication

In the world of remote work, there are 2 types of communication: 

• Synchronous communication
• Asynchronous communication

Let’s talk about each of the ways of communication.

What is synchronous communication?

Synchronous communication – real-time communication when you expect to get an answer at the same moment in time. It’s a usual way to communicate for many companies. Think about meetings and calls. 

Synchronous communication examples

• Live meetings
• Phone call
• Zoom, Skype, etc
• Messengers when you reply in real-time

What is asynchronous communication?

Asynchronous communication – when you send the message and don’t expect to get an immediate answer. Think about email. 

Asynchronous communication examples

• Email
• Ticket in help desk system
• Project management tools: Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc
• Messengers: Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc (the worst example for async communication because people still is waiting for a fast answer in the messenger)
• Focus (for status updates, stands, 1:1 meetings, etc)

The main difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication is the response time. 

Pros and cons of synchronous communication

Pros

• Fast replies. Real-time communication allows us to get answers almost instantly.
• Deep communication. You can communicate deeply and understand better your partner.
• Build emotional rapport. Messages and emails can’t build strong connections like a real-time conversation.

Cons

• Continuous distraction. Any brainwork requires high concentration and focus. There were a lot of researches on this topic – how much time do we need to get back to work after distraction. Numbers are different, but the result is the same. It takes a lot of time and our energy to get back to work and repair the previous level of productivity. 
• As the result, it increases stress. The person achieves less when teammates distract him/her during the workday. We spend more energy to make up for a lost time. Usually, it increases the level of stress. And it leads us to burnout.
• It takes a lot of time. Meetings are an expensive tool for a company. Especially, team meetings with 4 and more participants. 
• Reducing the quality of conversations and answers. During a call or a meeting, sometimes you don’t have enough time to think deeply about the best answer. As there result, you make not the best solutions.

Synchronous communication works great for:

• Brainstorm or creative work. Synchronous communication is great for teamwork when you need to brainstorm new ideas.
• Strategy sessions or problem-solving sessions. Meetings with rapidly changing context where you need the full attention of all participants at the same time.
• One-on-one meetings. It’s crucial to build an emotional connection to understand all unclear moments on one on one meetings. And synchronous communication is the best way to do it.
• Sales calls. 
• Onboarding new employees.

Pros and cons of asynchronous communication

Pros

• No distraction. Nobody calls you and you can do more focused work. Nobody distracts you during eating another “Pomodoro”. Increase productivity. You better plan the work. Reduce stress.
• Better answers. You can better formulate thoughts in the written mode. Also, it helps to document processes. Mike would like it.
• Communication is saved. You can think more before answer. As the result, you get better answers. And it’s written answers that you can use in FAQ then.
• Better goals. Asynchronous communication requires thinking twice and better formulate goals or tasks. 
• You can work from different time zones and it’s not necessary to be in the same place.  

Cons

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

Asynchronous communication works great for:

• Daily check-ins and weekly updates
• FYIs and process documentation
• Meeting about meeting
• Status updates
• Feedback requests
• Polls 

Best practices for synchronous communication

Prepare agenda

Good agenda is 50% of a successful meeting. Align everyone before the meeting by created a clear agenda. Everyone should be on the same page and understand why you meet and what you want to achieve at the end of the meeting.

Ask feedback

Ask for instant feedback after the meeting. What can you improve? It’s a good time to understand what you can improve by asking for feedback. 

Build personal connection

Focus on personal connection. Real-time communication allows building strong emotional rapport. Use it. Don’t waste your time and build strong relationships with your team.

Best practices for asynchronous communication

Plan and prepare

Urgent tasks and things that should have done yesterday are not compatible with asynchronous communication. It’s ok if you have a rush job. However, it’s not good, if you are always in rush. That’s why it’s crucial to be organized.

Bad example	Good Example
Hey, are you here? Help! Please send me analytics of the Product that you showed a month ago at the marketing meeting.	Hey Mary, I’m creating a presentation for partners about the Product for SMB.  I’m looking for Product analytics in 2019: – unique visitors – amount of orders, average check Could you please send me it until tomorrow evening?

Communicate clearly

Formulate each request clear. Your coworkers should have a minimum amount of questions. Add important details. Describe the goal.

Formulate meeting summary and be responsible for results

These tools we use to not distract each other in the team:

• Focus: for goal setting, daily check-ins, weekly updates, and 1-on-1s meeting
• Github: to maintain the software
• Dropbox: for documents and files
• Google Docs: for documents and spreadsheets
• Slack: for urgent communication 
• Zoom: for video calls

How to communicate?

How should you run communication now? You can’t do only synchronous or asynchronous communication. The right answer is the balance.

You should identify things that you want to keep running synchronously. We recommend you keep only these type of synchronous meetings:

• Sales calls.
• Brainstorm or creative work.
• Strategy sessions or problem-solving sessions.
• One-on-one meetings.
• Onboarding new employees.

Other things you can run asynchronously.

The ratio between synchronous and asynchronous communications should be 20/80.

How we do it in Focus

Here is our communication workflow in Focus. Quick note, we eat our own dog food and use Focus for several processes. You can use any other tools. The main goal of this example is to show you how you can organize communication in your company.

Quarterly meetings:

• Setting objectives: Zoom + Focus
  We run several real-time meeting on Zoom to create OKRs and use Focus to save them. You can read more about OKRs here.

• OKRs Retrospectives: Zoom + Focus
  The same process

• Quarterly team recaps: Slack
• Strategy session: Zoom

Monthly meetings:

• Monthly team recap and announcements: Slack (+Zoom, if it’s necessary)

Weekly meetings:

• Weekly updates: Focus
• 1-on-1 meetings: Zoom + Focus
• Sales call: Zoom

Daily meetings:

• Daily check-ins: Focus

Occasional meetings: 

• Brainstorm session: Zoom
• Urgent meetings: Zoom
• Onboarding new employee: Zoom

In this article, you can get more guidelines on how to run asynchronous meetings.

Conclusion

Building the right way of communication in the company is crucial. It allows you to achieve more and don’t feel anxiety because of unaccomplished things. Distraction and the lack of the right processes affect not only team productivity but also employee burnout. 

Using tips and examples from this guide, you will be able to improve processes in your company. Set the right habits for synchronous and asynchronous communications to work better. And join Focus to try async check-ins, updates, and other forms of asynchronous communication. 

P.S. All names and events are fictitious. Any coincidences with characters and facts from real life are pure coincidences.

The post Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication: Complete Guide For Remote Teams appeared first on Focus.

Asynchronous Communication is a key element for team productivity even if your team is not remote. Maybe you’ll be surprised – asynchronous communication is not only more effective but also helps people to complete the most important work and feel fulfillment. Let’s check how it works and how to build effective asynchronous communication.

Different studies show that productivity is not deterred by the shift to remote work. Why?

Let me tell you a short story. Meet John, who is a software developer in a tech company. He is a very nice guy who likes to help people. 

Right now, John tries to understand why Sylvia can’t export reports from their CRM. He is close to solving this issue…

At that moment, Ann is calling him.

John is a nice guy and loves to help other people. He postpones his job and answers the call: “Hey John, could you please help me change the button on the website…” Of course, he can. It doesn’t take a lot of time. A few minutes later, John solved this thing. Ann is happy. 

John is trying to remember what he worked on before the call. “Why we can’t export reports? Okay, let’s start from the beginning to find the reason for this problem.” 

Meanwhile, the team lead has created the new tasks for John recently. The to-do list is growing. John begins to feel nervous: “Why can’t I finish everything in a time-bound manner?” His anxiety becomes stronger. However, he is still a nice guy who likes to help other people. 

Suddenly Slack channel burst with dozens of messages. Users complain because they can’t log in to the system. Something wrong with their authentication. John is watching logs now to find out what happened and fix this problem. 

An hour later, everything is fixed. He is glad and wants to take a small break. But Monica is calling him at that moment. 

“Hi John, my client is tortured me. He wants to get more time for trying our product. Can you extend him a free plan for few days?” John is tired and without thinking accepted this request. He spends some time doing it. Also, he remembers that their tech side in pricing is not good and he should find the time to improve it. 

John gets back to the task manager and sees that he has 3 new tasks. And he still hasn’t solved the problem with reports export.

This is how it goes day after day. John often has to answer the same questions. And he still doesn’t have enough time to complete everything in a time-bound manner. 

He even read the book about time management to be more effective. However, the result is the same. He still doesn’t have enough time for effective time management. 

The end of the story. Sounds similar?

The real problem

This story is not about time management. It’s about effective communication. Communication might be 2 types:

• Asynchronous communication – when you send the message and don’t expect to get an immediate answer. Think about email. 
• Synchronous communication – real-time communication when you expect to get an answer at the same exact moment in time. 

Asynchronous communication examples

• Email
• Ticket in help desk system
• Project management tools: Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc
• Messengers: Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc (the worst example for async communication because people still is waiting for a fast answer in the messenger)
• Focus (for status updates, stands, 1:1 meetings, etc)

Synchronous communication examples

• Live meetings
• Phone call
• Zoom, Skype, etc
• Messengers when you reply in real-time

Synchronous communications have several big downsides:

• Continuous distraction. Any brainwork requires high concentration and focus. There were a lot of researches on this topic – how much time do we need to get back to work after distraction. Numbers are different, but the result is the same. It takes a lot of time and our energy to get back to work and repair the previous level of productivity. 
• As the result, it increases stress. The person achieves less when teammates distract him/her during the workday. We spend more energy to make up for a lost time. Usually, it increases the level of stress. And it leads us to burnout.
• It takes a lot of time. Meetings are an expensive tool for a company. Especially, team meetings with 4 and more participants. 
• Priority on communication instead of focus on what matters the most. I often heard from people: “How can I turn off my phone, so people will not able to reach me?” However, if someone turns off a phone, people who REALLY want to reach the person will find the way how to do it. 
• Reducing the quality of conversations and answers. During a call or a meeting, sometimes you don’t have enough time to think deeply about the best answer. As there result, you make not the best solutions.

The benefits of asynchronous communication

Another way is asynchronous communication. And you get opposite results: 

• No distraction. Nobody calls you and you can do more focused work. Nobody distracts you during eating another “Pomodoro”. Increase productivity. You better plan the work. Reduce stress.
• Better answers. You can better formulate thoughts in the written mode. Also, it helps to document processes. John would like it.
• Communication is saved. You can think more before answer. As the result, you get better answers. And it’s written answers that you can use in FAQ then.
• Better goals. Asynchronous communication requires thinking twice and better formulate goals or tasks. 
• You can work from different time zones and it’s not necessary to be in the same place.  

Downsides of asynchronous communication

However, asynchronous communication is not ideal, and here are several downsides:

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

It shows that you can’t remove sync communication in your process. However, you can balance these two types of communication to be more effective and reduce the amount of stress. 

How to balance both types of communication?

It’s hard to imagine how you can achieve your goals when everyone can distract you every time.  

On the other hand, asynchronous communication is respect for your time, plans, and focus. 

The right answer is balancing both types of communication. Avoid meetings and discussions that require much time. It’s important to identify topics that might wait and really urgent questions. For example, Hailley Griffis wrote how they communicate asynchronously at Buffer. And I agree with her:

Most things aren’t urgent. Knowing the difference between urgent and important communication is crucial.

Hailley Griffis

Anne-Laure Le Cunff recommends to document everything. If it’s not documented, it doesn’t exist. 

GitLab wrote Async 3.0, which is a great article about communication in their company. They share examples of asynchronous communication on GitLab teams. 

When to start asynchronous first

Our experience and GitLab shows that it’s crucial to avoid meetings and calls for the following events:

1. Status updates
2. FYIs and process documentation
3. Meeting about meeting
   

It’s better to use asynchronous communication. For example, you can gather daily check-ins instead of daily calls to align your team. In Focus, it takes only a few minutes to complete the form and see what’s going in your team.  

When to keep synchronous communication

At the same time, it’s clear that you can’t avoid sync communication. It allows building rapport faster and quickly delivers context to a group. Here are the main activities that it’s better to keep in a real-time way.

1. Sales calls
2. First-time meetings with external parties
3. First-time meetings with new team members
4. Important decisions (when stakes are high)
5. Supporting your direct reports (e.g. regular 1-on-1 meetings with documenting highlights of the meetings)

Tools for asynchronous communication

These tools we use to not distract each other in the team:

• Focus: for goal setting, daily check-ins, weekly updates, and 1-on-1s
• Github: to maintain the software
• Dropbox: for documents and files
• Google Docs: for documents and spreadsheets
• Slack: for urgent communication 
• Zoom: for video calls

It makes sense to say that we turn off notifications in most cases. Especially, in a messenger. You know, it’s hard to focus when you see the bunch of new messages in Slack.

Conclusion

We believe in the future of work in smart balance in asynchronous and synchronous communications. Use tools that increase transparency and avoid distraction. Set an emergency mechanism for how to connect in the case if you reduce the amount of real-time communication. And join Focus to try async check-ins, updates, and other forms of asynchronous communication. 

P.S. All names and events are fictitious. Any coincidences with characters and facts from real life are pure coincidences.

The post What is Asynchronous Communication? appeared first on Focus.

So you’re managing a team and you need some help with synchronicity. Need to know what’s going on with everyone in your team? Daily Stand-ups sound like just the thing you need! Learn about daily stand-ups or daily scrum. These meetings are not just a status update, it’s an essential tool.

Read for our tips and suggestions with team development.

There are three main parts that we will cover:

1. Defining Daily Stand-up
2. Why you need it as a leader
3. Implementation
4. Why you need Focus

Defining the Daily Stand-up

Daily stand-ups, daily scrum, daily meetings or whatever name you know them as are all the same thing. They are daily check-in meetings you have with your team.

Daily Stand-ups are timely, informal, and get to the point. No need to prepare presentations or rehearse, just go down a list of critical information you need to share. Your team should provide information on their obstacles and possibly what they’re doing to mitigate these problems.

The advantage to daily scrum is that you can give your input right away. Give some criticism or share some helpful tips.

You can even shut down ideas and help narrow down what your team should be doing.

These meetings originated as a tool for development teams-Agile development teams that it. Agile teams are defined by the Harvard Business Review here: Agile at Scale. They’ve grown since then and should be utilized by all teams, non-technical or otherwise.

Why you need it (as a leader)

These daily scrum are vital for team coordination. They are an effective form of communication that help you stay on task.

When your team is in sync, you can achieve more. Get better results, faster results more efficiently.

For example, you want to have your team post on the company’s social media everyday. Creating a calendar and delegating the tasks is the first step. If someone misses a post or creates something not to your liking, a face to face meeting, even over video call is the best way to communicate your message. A quick call can aid in overcoming misunderstandings.

Daily stand-ups prevent critical issues from growing.

These frequent stand-ups don’t allow for issues to fall through the crack. Because problems can be address easily as they appear or even before they’re noticeable, they can be tackled on the spot.

Daily Stand-ups are not just individual reports.

The benefit of doing daily stand-ups is its notable difference from a normal meeting or report. If you treat these daily stand-ups like a a report meeting then you lose it’s value.

Here are some examples of how you can stay in sync:

1. Write a mini agenda/list so that the team can view
2. Don’t go off topic in daily stand-ups
3. Stay active in group chats
4. Use Focus (more details below)

At Focus, our main goal is to help teams achieve the most! We want to share our technology and OKR guides so that no matter how big or small your organization is, it can reach it’s full potential. We believe in daily stand-ups and that every leader should give it a try!

Implementation

So now that you’re ready to start having these daily scrum with your team, here’s what you need to know.

Rule #1 is to know your team’s schedule. Find a time that works for everyone and that means everyone. Having expected attendance and participation gathers respect. You show respect for your team and take time to check up on them, so they should share their honest thoughts and comments in return.

Rule #2 is to keep it short. This is not the time to have long, deep in-depth conversations. These daily stand-ups can delve into personal topics, but should ultimately stay light and focused. You want to understand what’s going on and any obstacles. Any “blockers” that need more than 15 minutes to explain should be saved for a later meeting, which you can plan during this daily check-in.

The length of daily stand-ups are a great advantage. Each party has to equally participate and the limited time helps everyone stay focused to not only talk about their plans but also actively listen.

On a side note, these meetings are short, so remember to be on time!

There’s no space for uncomfortably in daily stand-ups.

Rule #3 is to always address impediments. If your team never has any issues then it’s because they don’t feel comfortable diverging information. As there are always ways to improve, there will always be obstacles to your goal. Leaders should aid in teamwork, meaning your team should not be too intimidated to let you know what issues they face. Be wary of this secrecy. Even if your team is at their peak performance, have them share their impediments and how they can address them.

There’s no time for passivity.

The last major rule is to stay committed! Don’t give up on these meetings. Daily means daily. As casual as they may be, your team should treat is an a important part of their day. The more you value these stand-ups the more your team will as well. Lead by example and you’ll soon enjoy the benefits of daily stand-ups!

My personal tip is to thank people for their time! As quick as these meetings are, it’s always polite to give a “thank you” to the person for their time. It’s better not to assume what your team’s schedule might be. Last minute changes can happen to these meetings, and you might not know what plans they had to move to make it on time. Take advantage of this time to recognize your employee’s hard work and build your professional relationship! It never hurts to be polite and friendly. This relationship can translate into work and in turn improve your team’s commitment.

Daily Stand-ups go a long way.

Read our tips on one on one meetings:

9 One on One Meeting Tips

What are One on One Meetings

Why you need Focus

At Focus, we pride ourselves on being communication-oriented and solution driven. Our use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) helps our team to stay on task and figure out creative solutions.

Read more about these OKRs on our blog:

What are OKRs

We use many forms of communication to let our team know our status. Focus had daily check ins where you share your actions and tasks as well as meaningful insight. Every member of the team can see what everyone else is doing. To make this process even more convenient, we have a Slackbot for these daily check ins as well. Weekly team meetings and one on one meetings are a must for our team. Our blog serves as evidence of this synchronicity!

We post about the changes Focus has gone through on our blog:

Focus Update

Daily stand-ups, check-ins, and OKR are growing in popularity so you and your team should give us a try! Don’t lag behind all the teams and start-ups. With Focus, you’ll find ease in fostering clarity and teamwork across all types of departments and projects!

Schedule a meeting with our CEO and team at Focus.

Let me know what you think about my article and share your experience with daily stand-ups below! Follow our Facebook and LinkedIn!

The post Daily Stand-ups are a Must! Here’s Why. appeared first on Focus.

Teams often lose focus on top priorities for a multitude of reasons. At Focus, we believe that staying concentrated on what “matters” is one of the most important skills for product teams.

Here are some sources of distraction your team may face:

1. The team works on a hard project for too long. Instead of validating the main idea in a month, the team had developed the project for half of the year, which is quite a long interval of time.
2. The team created a new project, but it doesn’t fit the company’s vision and strategy. However, the project is so cool and motivating that the team finds themselves enjoying it.
3. Stakeholders from different teams can’t agree on strategic questions or concepts, resulting in a lack of progress for the project.
4. The team makes a product that’s designated for a non-target customer or the product’s value proposition doesn’t fit the company’s vision.  

How can a product team stay focused?

I talked with many companies and found that there were two main problems when the team struggle to stay focused. Either they don’t know the company’s vision or teams set the big objectives but forget about them in daily routines. We, admittedly, struggled with this issue too and that’s why we decided to build Focus.

We also discussed the reasons why it happens and how a company can fix it. Based on these conversations, we found 3 main pillars that a company should have for staying on what matters the most:

• Clear vision. CEO and CPO should describe a clear vision for everyone. What’s most important for the company? Why does it matter? ‘Why’ is the core question for any company. Learn more about why it matters with Simon Sinek, who explains why you should start with why. Without establishing and communicating your vision, it’s hard to identify if a new project or initiative is a good fit or not for the company on the medium to long-term.
• Right OKRs. Setting right OKRs that fit the company’s vision is the next step to marry strategy with tactics. 
• Constant processes. The challenge is staying focused on OKRs in daily operations. We see that a lot of companies forget about them because of routines and different unimportant but urgent tasks. You know this, it’s called fighting fires. The only way to stay on top of your priorities day-to-day is to create a workflow that enables your team to be more focused. Daily and weekly check-ins where you discuss your OKRs should be a fundamental processes in your company. 

How to stay focused?

Lead by vision

Vision is an inspirational story about a new future when your company achieves new goals. And how your customers and the team will live better when it happens. 

Why should you talk about vision?

Because people love a good story.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his books ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’ that humanity evolved because of the ability of humans to come up with memes – stories that make people change their behavior and distribute them to others.

During product development, all systems (product, code, architecture, client segments, contexts, etc.) are becoming ever more complex exponentially. However, teams’ competencies increase linearly. It explains why a company changes teams three times on average during this journey:

• First there’s the team that launches product
• Then the team that scales it
• And the team that builds processes for the main market

This has less of an impact on founders because they work mostly with the company’s vision, which is not restricted by complex systems and product architecture.

According to research on presentation methods, messages delivered as the stories can be up 22 times more memorable than just facts.

Great vision, which inspires the team and fits the company’s purpose increases motivation and helps to stay focused on the most important things. It works even for making a small decision because the team will remember the vision and think about how the new decision impacts on the ideal future the company is building towards.

Vision leadership works not only for founders. In this Product Leadership book, authors advocate for each Product Manager to work on creating and delivering the vision for product hypotheses.

In Amazon, all employees learn to talk the vision language. After you have written a document, you read the press release one more time and ask yourself: is it an ambitious idea to work on it? Should we do it or it doesn’t matter so much? It allows us to work and make decisions guided by the vision.

Principles to create a vision for product teams:

1. It is necessary to know your market segment and do customer validation with MVP. The vision should describe the future of target markets with the solution to their current and future needs.
2. The product teams’ vision should be aligned with the company’s vision. Stakeholders should be involved in crafting it.
3. You should find the best vision for your team after several iterations talking with stakeholders and coworkers. By the way, Working Backwards by Amazon embodies this approach.

Set the right OKRs 

If the CEO or CPO doesn’t have the right goals, then nothing will work. Of course you don’t want that. But how to set goals in the right way?

OKR is the most proven tool for setting goals. 

Different teams depending on their sizes might have different OKR cycles. Small startups and companies with few stakeholders often use 2-month intervals. Large companies prefer quarterly OKR cycles. 

Companies usually don’t set OKRs correctly in the first cycles. Using OKRs is a continuous process of improvement. The team runs retrospectives and analyzes what works and what doesn’t. It’s an ongoing learning process. Implementing the framework is hard, however, OKR is the best tool to stay focused.

If you had tried OKRs and it didn’t work, it doesn’t mean that OKR doesn’t work. It means that you haven’t found the right way how OKRs could work for your team.

You can read more about how to use OKRs in this article.

Processes that help to stay focused

1. One on one meetings are a great way to reiterate the vision and tie the employee’s personal development to the goals of the company. It’s the one on one meeting where you can elaborate on what the company is building towards and how each individual team member can contribute to it in their area of responsibility. It’s also a great place to get feedback on any activities that you thought would tie into the vision and the goals set but the rest of the company either doesn’t understand or just thinks it’s not aligned.
2. Automatic daily and weekly reminders of what the team has accomplished. It’s short messages with new updates for a specific channel or chat, which is visible for founders or executives. It helps founders to realize current status and ask the team if something went wrong. 
3. Public channel for check-ins where everyone publishes daily achievements. It’s like daily standups but in written type with outcomes that the person achieved the day before and what they plan on doing next.
4. Ruthlessly say no to ideas that don’t fit the company’s vision and goals.
5. The CEO and CPO should strictly follow their goals and stay focused on it every day. If they run some side projects, everyone would see it. People might start to do side projects too. Leading by example is the best way to show the team that focus on top priorities is crucial for the company. 
6. There is a Weekly Business Review (WBR) at Amazon. Every Product Manager updates key metrics of the team and marks objectives with the colors green, yellow, and red (like OKRs). It explains where they did well and where they fell short. In your company, you can gather all WBRs in Focus or any other software where managers will analyze it and give feedback.
7. Monthly Business Review (MBR) and Quarterly Business Review (QBR) are the same as for other timeframes. It’s analyzed one time per month and per quarter.

What is the focus?

Imagine you changed your vision twice and you are working with the last vision now.

It’s Q2 2020 now, and you set the company’s OKRs and teams’ OKRs to achieve your vision.

You move forward but you see that some teams are doing something that doesn’t fit the company’s vision. You are beginning to close these projects.

In the daily check-ins, CPO should: 

• Correlate team’s route if it moves in a different direction
• Stretch the team for achieving larger goals

Some tips to stay focused for product teams

1. If everything is top priority it means nothing is priority. Limit the number of items you work on at the same time. It depends on the team, but 2-3 maximum is a good golden rule.
2. Having a good manager/mentor in the company who has an incredible way of splitting the product vision into a set of core values.
3. Transparency and clarity of what’s important to achieving the mission are an absolute necessity.
4. Start your day with the most important item that day, finish it. Don’t stop or get distracted by anything.
5. Next move to routine items that should be done daily. This is a boring list that you deal with which contains daily/weekly/monthly tasks. Take them on one at a time and complete as many as your psyche will allow.
6. Lastly, intermittently switch from routine to your ‘bonus list’. The items that are fun but lightly affect the trajectory. This will make your day more fun.
7. At the end of each day ask yourself “What were the 1 or 2 important items completed today that I’d be proud of at the end of the year?”
8. When you get overwhelmed and struggle to focus, you might ask yourself what you should do if you could only do one thing that day.

Summary

Staying focused is the permanent process that starts with the CEO and CPO. Here are 3 main pillars that any company should have to stay on what matters the most:

• Clear vision
• Right OKRs
• Continuous processes

It’s a continuous process that takes full attention of all people in the team, especially C-level managers. There is no silver bullet here. However, to stay focused on what matters is a crucial skill for any company. 

We built a focus management platform to help companies be more effective and stay focused on top priorities in daily operations. You can try Focus for free to automate check-ins, one on one meetings, and OKRs. Start working smarter with Focus today.

The post How to Stay Focused for Product Teams appeared first on Focus.

While speaking at many management conferences, I see that a lot of people struggle with setting OKRs (objectives and key results). The most important part I want to point out is that people often make similar OKR mistakes. 

In this article, you find the top 5 mistakes that companies make when setting OKRs and the ways on how to avoid them. If you follow these steps, you will save a lot of time for yourself and for your team in OKRs implementation. And of course, you will bring out the next level of creating an environment that values and emphasizes output.

Topics covered in this article:

• What is OKR?
• What are the obstacles that come with OKR?
• Top 5 OKR mistakes

Before we begin, I want to mention the main benefits of OKRs because it allows you to understand what you should be getting out of them. And no one can tell better about it than John Doerr, who worked with “The Father of OKR”, Andrew Grove. In his book “Measure what matters”, he describes four OKR superpowers:

• Superpower #1 — Focus and Commit to Priorities: High-performance organizations hone in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter. OKRs implore leaders to make hard choices. They’re a precision communication tool for departments, teams, and individual contributors. By dispelling confusion, OKRs give us the focus needed to win.
• Superpower #2 — Align and Connect for Teamwork: With OKR transparency, everyone’s goals—from the CEO down—are openly shared. Individuals link their objectives to the company’s game plan, identify cross-dependencies, and coordinate with other teams. By connecting each contributor to the organization’s success, top-down alignment brings meaning to work. By deepening people’s sense of ownership, bottom-up OKRs foster engagement, and innovation.
• Superpower #3 — Track for Accountability: OKRs are driven by data. They are animated by periodic check-ins, objective grading, and continuous reassessment—all in a spirit of no-judgment accountability. An endangered key result triggers action to get it back on track or to revise or replace it if warranted.
• Superpower #4 — Stretch for Amazing: OKRs motivate us to excel by doing more than we’d thought possible. By testing our limits and affording the freedom to fail, they release our most creative, ambitious selves.

Sounds good? Then let’s talk about the definition of Objectives and Key Results and what OKR mistakes teams often make using them.

What is an OKR?

OKR (Objective and Key Results) is a goal-setting method used by Google, Netflix, and many others. If you want to get a key difference between KPI and OKR then think about it as the difference between Waterfall methodology and Agile. I hope it helps ?

To clarify, OKR is a framework for setting ambitious goals that help a company focus on the most important issues. There are no hard commitments and bonuses for achievements. It also doesn’t impact the performance scores. In contrast, OKRs are ambitious, almost unachievable goals that continuously sync the progress.

OKR consists of 2 pieces: 

1. An objective is an ambitious goal, which motivates and inspires the team. It shows WHAT we should achieve.
2. Key results are metrics that measure HOW we get to the objective. Are we in the timeframe? Should we increase the velocity or change the goal? Are we going in the right direction or are we losing focus?

OKR principles 

It’s important to understand not only the shape but also OKR principles:

1. Publicity and transparency – everyone can see all OKRs. 
2. Ambitious – some OKRs should be at least 3-10 times higher than usual goals to motivate people on finding new and creative solutions. 
3. OKRs don’t impact salary or bonuses – people will not set ambitious objectives if they know that they could lose their income.
4. Constant tracking – OKR syncing should be at least bi-weekly. However, running weekly updates is a much better way of tracking OKRs. It helps a team be aligned and change initiatives if it’s necessary. 
5. The fewer objectives and key results are better – it helps to focus on the top priorities and achieve the best outcome instead of trying to complete too many goals and get the worst traction. There should be no more than 5 key results for an objective. Less is more. Also, don’t create more than 5 objectives in a quarter. 
6. 50/50 or 60/40. OKR is not a top-down goal-setting system like KPI. The exec team sets 40-50% of OKRs and employees create the other goals. It’s the mix of top-down and bottom-up goals that generally settles at around half-and-half.
7. The OKR cycle is a quarter. OKRs set clear quarters, but you can change yearly OKRs if it’s necessary. Quarterly OKRs gives you a combination of agile and clarity. On one hand, you can react pretty rapidly to the market’s changes or customers’ demands. On the other hand, you have clarity of the top priorities for the next quarter. During some major forces, like the COVID-19 pandemic, some companies move to monthly cycles to change goals faster in times of ambiguity.
8. Key results are only metrics. Sometimes companies use indicators like reference points or tools for employee motivation. In OKRs, we use key results like coordinates in a GPS tracker. It’s only about the current status, not about motivation or bonuses. They help us keep the right of way, adjust the speed, and change the tactics. It’s crucial for a team because they show everyone where we are now and where we are heading. It allows a company to be a united team that can adapt to the environment and different contexts. 

We looked at what makes OKRs powerful and what to pay attention to. Now let’s move onto tackling OKR mistakes.

OKRs are hard, but making OKR mistakes are easy

Everything sounds great and makes sense, right? OKRs are great! Then why are you reading an article about avoiding OKR mistakes? When you’re first starting to implement OKRs in a company, problems usually arise. Someone doesn’t want to achieve objectives that don’t correlate to salary, others can’t make the right and ambitious objectives or set useful key results. There are many problems that a team runs into during the first OKR cycle and it is easy to run into these common OKR mistakes.

When a company thinks about using OKRs, they should know that the company’s culture will be changed – such as emotional maturity in the workplace, employee responsibility, communication with colleagues, and feedback skills.

The good news is about the timeframe. Goals can not be achieved in one night. What you can do is implement OKRs and transform your processes and skills sprint by sprint. And the most important thing to do is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your company and to create the right OKRs strategy based on these insights. 

Instead of a heroic two weeks sprint of OKRs settings, it’s better to implement the new framework wisely with less speed, but more effective. This approach allows OKRs to live in organizations when a founder stops spending too much attention on it.

The best approach is to establish a cross-functional team that will be responsible for OKRs implementation. Usually, the consists of the board of directors and from five to ten leaders from the organization. People from this team should get training on OKRs to properly understand how they work. Afterward, the team makes a step-by-step plan on OKR implementation and starts working on it. It’s important now to avoid those OKR mistakes that hundreds of companies have made before you. Let’s check them out.

5 most common OKR mistakes

OKR mistake #1: Too ambitious or too simple OKRs

One OKR mistakes we see companies make often is where the objectives they set are either too complex or too simple. And we did the same in the first iteration of OKRs. We set the OKR ‘Triple our sales in the quarter‘. It was a pretty ambitious objective, however, we didn’t have appropriate resources at that time to fulfill this goal. At the end of the cycle, we were exhausted as we achieved an objective of less than 10%. 

At the same time, we see many cases when companies set simple OKRs like ‘’Create the new website”, which probably is not so ambitious and hard to do. 

You should try to avoid setting very simple or very hard objectives. How do you set an ambitious, but not impossible OKR? 

Answer these 2 questions:

1. Will we achieve X in 3 months in our usual mode? If we understand that it’s achievable then it’s a simple goal. If not then it looks ambitious and we ask the next question.
2. Will we achieve X in a year? If we feel that we might do it – it will be hard, but we could achieve it in a year, then it looks like a good candidate on OKRs for a quarter. If we understand that we won’t be able to achieve it in a year, then it’s most likely your setting an impossible OKRs. 

Setting the right OKRs is the skill that a team improves step by step from quarter to quarter. Your first OKRs should not be perfect, because trying to do something ideal from the first attempt can take a lot of time and it also directly affects your enthusiasm. Feel free to set good enough OKRs to start using it early and then run an analysis, which will improve your next goals. 

Bad OKR:

Objective: x10 revenue in the next quarter
Key results: 

• Increase traffic on the website from 10,000 up to 50,000
• Increase Visitor-to-Customer conversion rate from 1% to 2%
• Achieve $10,000,000 in revenue

Why is it not a good OKR? On one hand, it’s a pretty ambitious objective and should inspire team leaders. However, there are two issues in the objective. First, the objective is not necessarily a measurable goal. Numbers in the title don’t inspire people in the team because they can think that it’s just boosted indicators. Second, the objective is too ambitious and it’s unrealistic in most cases. Increase revenue up to 10 times in a quarter – do you and your team believe in it? It’s hard to do in a year for most companies. And it’s even more difficult to achieve in a quarter. If your team won’t believe it’s possible then they will delay initiatives because employees often have a lot of tasks to do.

How can we transform this OKR and make it better?

Strong OKR:

Objective: Achieve a sales record in the next quarter
Key results: 

• Increase traffic on the website from 10,000 up to 50,000
• Increase Visitor-to-Customer conversion rate from 1% to 2%
• Achieve $10,000,000 in revenue

Now, this OKR looks pretty ambitious and we aren’t using numbers in the objective, which is really good for motivation. It’s a significant, concrete, and action-oriented objective that inspires the team. 

OKR mistake #2: Too many key results or objectives

Another OKR mistake we see is creating too many key results or objectives. In this scenario, companies lose their focus using the framework that was designed to keep them focus. Less is better.

How can you determine if there are too many OKRs? John Doerr recommends using 3 to 5 key results for an objective. The less is more. We prefer using 3 key results in many cases and set 5 results only if we don’t have another way. 

Using too many key results leads to a loss of focus on the most important things because the team will be doing a lot of different stuff. That’s why it’s better to set three or four outcomes to the goal.

Also, teams have similar mistakes with objectives. Some departments have 5 or even more objectives in a quarter. It also brings your team down a level when you are doing so many different things and wasting your attention in different areas. 

How many objectives should a team have? 

Again, John Doerr recommends 5-7 objectives for a company. We suggest setting 1-3 objectives for each level of your organization. 

OKR mistake #3: Using only top-down OKRs

This mistake often is made by autocratic leaders who think that OKR is the same as KPI. They set top-down OKRs for all teams and then it doesn’t get significant outcomes because people don’t believe in these ambitious goals and don’t understand why they should achieve them if it doesn’t correlate with bonuses. As a result, leaders think that OKRs don’tt work. 

OKR is not an autocratic top-down goal methodology. It’s all about people participating in this process. Each team thinks about its OKRs. People begin to understand the company’s objectives and how they contribute to the total outcomes, what’s the value they give to the company by their day to day operations. 

It helps everyone to see the real value of his or her works. And this is the place where the magic happens. People understand the company’s goals and know how they contribute to it. They set ambitious OKRs for their teams or for themselves. It’s a game-changer for employee engagement. 

However, you will not achieve this by highly hierarchical top-down goals. These goals are not connected to people’s views and desires. They might think, “It looks that our management wants us to work hard for achieving these ambitious goals without paying bonuses for it.” Do you think that motivates people? Top-down autocratic goals don’t encourage people to do great.

That’s why it’s crucial to build a culture where top-down goals work with bottom-up objectives. C-Suites determine a company’s OKRs. It’s high-level objectives for the whole organization. At the same time, teams start a discussion about their visions. What value they will put on the table for achieving the company’s goals. In this process, department heads talk with their people to determine the best and the most ambitious goals for them. Afterward, teams present their OKRs to the C-level management and make it public after confirmation. 

You see, everyone participates in the goal-setting. It’s not just a management game. People in teams begin to take care of the objectives because they participated in its creation. If you use OKRs only top-down then change it as soon as possible and give your people the opportunities for participation in this process. 

OKR mistake #4: Don’t track progress regularly

OKR is not a silver bullet that works after they were identified. You can’t set OKRs and forget about them until the end of the cycle.  

People are used to tracking metrics and indicators in both ways – either it was requested or before bonus pay. In OKRs, you should do it regularly at least one time per two weeks. However, weekly updates work much better in most cases. In this case, OKRs fulfill their destination, which is to be the coordinates for your organization and link strategy with tactics. 

Let’s imagine that you are going on a journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles. You turn on the GPS navigator to check the status. If you know the road, then you don’t need a GPS navigator. However, it works only for well-known goals that you’ve already done before. But if you don’t know the route and you don’t look on the navigator then each turn in the road could lead you to the wrong place where you are moving further from your way each minute. 

That’s why it’s crucial to set the specific day on the week and do weekly (or bi-weekly) OKRs updates. 

It doesn’t take a lot of time to do weekly updates. It unites your team across top priorities, which is a very important benefit for everyone. 

How can you track OKRs weekly? 

• First, you should answer this simple question, “What’re your OKR achievements this week?”. If you didn’t do anything regarding OKRs, then ask yourself why not? You should analyze this issue and take action on how to improve it for next week.
• Second, see who worked on OKRs this week – what’s about your key results? Are they changed? What’s your current status now – are you on track, behind, or at risk? Write everything down that everyone understands total progress. Keep it transparent.
• Third, are there areas for improvement? What can you or your team improve on for next week? Did you achieve any planned outcomes this week? If so, you can probably set a more ambitious goal for the next week. If not, then what were the main blockers? What can you and your team improve in the next sprint?

See, magic is here. Everyone analyzes their OKRs outcomes weekly and gets insights from it. Your team starts thinking about OKRs each week, which means that you are thinking about what matters the most, constantly. It sounds simple, but it’s so powerful. 

You can track your OKRs in sheets or in special software like Focus. You need to begin building a habit of weekly retrospectives and creating a transparent culture that values and emphasizes output. Learn more about how to run short scrum meetings in the linked article.

OKR mistake #5: Using results that a team doesn’t know how to measure

Some companies create very ambitious key results like ‘Increase NPS up to 2 times.’ However, sometimes when asking them about what’s the current NPS (Net Promoter Score) you hear silence because they don’t know it. 

And how will these teams track their progress and achievements?

In the case of NPS, it’s pretty hard to measure the score in several days. You need time to implement it on websites, newsletters, and so on. Then you should receive the data from customers. It takes time. If you have an OKR with increasing NPS by 50% this quarter and you haven’t implemented an NPS system yet, then you might have some problems with it, because you’ll be spending one or two months just setting up an NPS and receiving your first batch of data. With each weekly update, you will say something like this, ‘We haven’t had data for measuring NPS yet’. That’s why it’s better to set a key result as ‘Implement an NPS system’ and track how many initiatives you will finish for this key result. For example, if implementing an NPS system consists of 30 to-dos and you close 27 that means that you complete this key result at 90%.

When setting a key result, you should think about how it’s measured. Also, remember that they are indicators. Key results should tell a team about progress, so everyone can adjust his or her goals, accordingly.

OKR checklist

Phew, those are some big OKR mistakes, right? We gathered the most popular OKR mistakes in this article. However, it’s not all the mistakes companies make during OKRs implementation. That’s why I’d like to finish the article with a check-list that helps you to improve your OKRs. If you want to know more about OKRs, you can read this article on how to set powerful OKRs.

Check that your objectives fit these criteria:

• Objectives have a quarter cycle
• The objective is WHAT we want to achieve
• The objective helps to achieve high-level goals or other teams get value by achieving that objective
• You have 2-5 objectives per team’s level 
• 50% or more objectives set bottom-up
• Goals are divided into two types: ambitious and operational

Check-list for key results:

• 50% or more key results set bottom-up
• Key results are measurable and clearly describe achievements of objectives (at least “done/not done”, but it’s better to avoid this version)
• Track progress each week (or, at least, bi-weekly)

Summary

We looked at what makes a good OKR, what challenges you can face in your organization, and what common OKR mistakes to avoid. I hope they will help you in setting the right OKRs that will bring your team to the next level. And remember that the main mission of OKRs is to unite your company while making the focus on top priorities and transparent culture. 

Finally, I believe that identifying top priorities and consistent focus on it day-to-day is the best way for building high-performing teams. That’s why we created Focus, a tool that keeps teams on top priorities every day. Start working smarter with Focus.

The post 5 OKR Mistakes and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Focus.

We interviewed Madhuri Aggarwal, a senior business consultant solving product challenges for clients such as eBay and Cisco. Madhuri shared her expertise in product management and favorite tools and processes she uses on a daily basis. 

What’s your background, and what are you working on?

With a masters in marketing and computer science engineering degree, I sit at the intersection of Business, Technology, and User Experience. I have led multiple IT projects from ideation to execution for my employers and clients alike during the last 8 years. I really enjoy synthesizing customer and business needs, defining and driving product roadmaps for developing client facing platforms and employee facing applications.

Apart from supporting my client in their business continuity planning efforts amidst the COVID-19 crisis, these days, I am devoting my time on community building efforts.  

Can you describe your current role and how you got started in product management?

Out of business school, I found this amazing opportunity to work at an Indian SMB that offered a Marketing Rotation program. While there, I fell in love with product management—and that led me to a job at a Silicon Valley startup and later Cognizant Business Consulting. My consulting job has taught me how to uncover problems, identify solutions, and more importantly, how to build and market some of the cutting-edge technology offerings. 5 years ago, I got the opportunity to lead product lifecycle management responsibilities in order to bring a B2B solution to life for my client, eBay. Since then, I am helping them – as a Product Manager- in developing platforms & applications while delivering lasting experiences and business value.

Could you tell us about your day to day? What technologies and methods do you use on a daily basis?

Product manager responsibilities vary not just from company to company but also at project/team level. Due to this variability, there is a wide range of day-to-day activities, but ultimately, a product manager is still responsible for doing whatever it takes to collaborate with multiple teams and move different conversations towards closure.

On a typical day, right after checking my emails, I like to prioritize and stick with 3 or less things that I want to achieve on that day. Being prompt about answering my customer or team’s questions or concerns, standups or other sprint meetings, stakeholder meetings, requirement definition or backlog prioritization within JIRA, keeping abreast of industry trends are some of the other tasks my job demands on most days.

At eBay, we follow agile. Agile works best with projects with uncertainties as this methodology allows quick iterations as per the user validation. However, you need to keep an open mind, be adaptable to change, and assess the risk to cope with agile methodology.

• Using a tool such as Zoom allows not just virtual meetings but makes it easy to record conversations- to be referenced later. 
• Gartner for the collective industry research and the latest thinking of the analysts to help determine where your market is headed.
• Axure for wireframing
• Slack for team messaging
• Visio for flowcharting
• JIRA for project management but I also love the simplicity of Trello and intuitiveness of Asana

This doesn’t mean that MS Office 365 shouldn’t have a prominent slot in your product management toolkit.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and the obstacles you’ve overcome as a PM?

While building a product from 0 to 1, it required the use of different mental muscles and a deep understanding of all of the factors in a launch, not just the ideation and writing requirements. Everything from operations, how do we sell, how do we support, how do we go to market, how do we measure, etc. was a grilling exercise while I was building eBay’s first business-to-business platform. Scaling from 1 to N was another beast for the same platform in a different industry and in different geography.

Apart from these complex problems, I had one issue in the past and I believe many Product Managers have is, ensuring that their successes and the value they deliver are articulated across the organization. This is so important as you could be doing an amazing job at delivering features one after the other and oftentimes, you tend to get so involved in delivering a great solution that you forget to tell people what you and your team have achieved. This can lead to people not understanding the value you or the product bring to the organization. I am not claiming to have addressed this completely, but I am getting better at analyzing.

What are your favorite ways to learn more about your users?

• Feedback from users directly- but more often, you don’t get a lot of it.
• Quantitative research – numbers can unravel behaviors that might be difficult to discover during an in-person interview
• Feedback from or through customers teams or partners
• User session recordings to see how the users interact and their journeys
• Assume now and test later approach when we lack any substantial information about my existing users

Do you have tips for managing teams in different timezones?

When it comes to remote teams that work across time zones, structure and order are everything. The more people work on your team, the more important is it to establish processes and procedures for everyone to follow with a clear escalation path if an issue arises. Developing a Code Style Guide has helped my teams spread across multiple geographies.

• Building relationships – not just business ones, but personal ones, with all stakeholders, is as critical as voicing appreciation and celebrating the wins together.

• Have one time where everyone can get together in real-time. This invariably requires sacrifice for somebody, but it’s important.
• For better communication, I use time overlaps for conference calls and/or joint team assignments and whenever possible, meet virtually through videoconferences
• I emphasize JIRA or Slack for Asynchronous Communication

Being constantly in touch with all the team, not only the customer, is key to building a good relationship with them and this will help you to create better products.

How often do you run meetings? How do you run them? Does your team run standups?

Apart from a daily scrum, we do Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Retrospective every 2 weeks. Backlog grooming is typically monthly to fill the gaps, only if the PM deems it necessary.

We work using Scrum, so it’s a matter of keeping track of work with the dailies in each sprint. After a few sprints, you’ll get to know the capacity of your team in order to be more effective when planning the next ones and also to prioritize your backlog.

During daily scrum, every team member answers:

1. What did we do yesterday?
2. What are we doing today?
3. What is in our way?

Before the sprint planning meeting, I ensure that all items in the backlog that could be considered for the sprint (features, bugs, optimizations, stakeholder feedback, etc.) meet the team’s definition of ready and are not too large or small.

As a PM, I keep the roadmap both current and visible to the whole team inside of Jira before the sprint planning meeting. Everyone keeps their availability updated in project wiki.

During the sprint planning, I will present the sprint backlog to the scrum team and look for alignment. If items are not estimated already, we estimate them to get a sense of how many can be selected for a sprint. We discuss any issues, assumptions, or dependencies before the team can go back to work.

At the end of the sprint, we review the increments and check the backlog. I ensure that the definition of done is met for the increments and that the QEs do not have any issues. The entire group then collaborates on what to do next.

During the sprint retrospective, my scrum team discusses what to:

• Start doing
• Stop doing
• Continue doing

How deeply should product people know about marketing strategy, UX design, and coding?

In my experience, background doesn’t make much of a difference. You should go towards where your passion is. And, as long as you’re not afraid to learn on the fly, you’ll be fine.

Do you have coding skills?

As a computer science engineering student, I did code quite a bit during my undergrad but never had to, after then. I wouldn’t hesitate to, as a PM, if a project demands.

What skills do you think would be most valuable to learn and prioritize for an aspiring PM with no technical background?

Good product managers know what they don’t know and are excited to learn about it. They have a basic familiarity with technology and are curious to understand how a product works.

My advice to the PM aspirants with no technical background would be to learn how to solve problems before attempting to learn to code. Be aware of the technical goings-on and trends in the industry. Learn tracing through the product flows to understand fundamental user issues. Know the difference between ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ which can be a difficult distinction to make. Learn to empathize – not just with your customers but also with your developers. As a PM, the more I asked questions to the developers and genuinely listened, the better I could appreciate and represent their point of view. 

If you understand your product, communicate effectively to technical and non-technical audiences, eager to learn, and stay organized, you’ll be ahead of the game.

The post Madhuri Aggarwal: About remote work, technologies, and skills for PMs appeared first on Focus.

This week, we interviewed Jedrzej Kaminski, a Product Manager at EyeEm. Jedrzej shared his expertise in A/B Testing and data analytics to discuss measuring success when conducting research. He also answered burning questions on technologies he uses on a daily basis, his experience at EyeEm, and how to make different transitions into Product.

What’s your background, and what are you working on?

I have a master’s degree in psychology, but was always interested in technology – even my final thesis was about an online adaptation of pen-and-paper test to measure creativity, so I spend half the time doing research and half coding. I’m working right now as a Product Manager for EyeEm – an AI driven Marketplace for photos delivered by a vibrant and talented community. 

Can you describe your current role and how you got started in product management?

My career in IT started in Quality Assurance. While performing other responsibilities like manual and automated testing, I’ve found that talking to our community, participating in the user research and crunching the analytics numbers are quite enjoyable. They were also very close to the user-centric mindset I gained when trying to find bugs before our users. I wanted to try the Product role and EyeEm gave me an opportunity to do that. Now I’m a part of two cross-functional teams focused on driving business KPIs. 

Could you tell us about your day to day? What technologies and methods do you use on a daily basis?

My day to day activities heavily depend on where are we, as a team, in the project development cycle. 

During product discovery it’s more about analyzing the data, user behavior, quantitative and qualitative, to find the problems, frictions and struggles we can help them with. Formulating those problems is crucial, because then we know that the team work can be most impactful. Amplitude, Google Analytics, Tableau or just doing SQL queries – those are some of the tools that are helping a lot with quantitative analysis. You can also use Typeform or even Google form for more open, qualitative responses, but live user interviews are always a goldmine of insights. Obviously, nowadays, when we tackle the COVID-19 issue, we are doing video interviews instead.

After that it’s all about planning and ruthless prioritisation and looking for the smallest possible implementation of the feature that you have in mind, that can give us data to confirm that we are going in the right direction. You don’t want to waste resources on something that will not bring any value – to the user or the company. At the same time, while everyone is trying their best to mitigate that risk, be prepared for a situation when most of the feature ideas will have little to no impact on the metrics. This means that you need to try a lot, learn from the failures, and improve over time. Treat features as tests, with hypothesis and ruthless data validation. 

Then we can focus on crystalizing the concept and execution. During this phase the workload consists of, but is not limited to; managing stakeholders,  creating and maintaining tickets, design reviews, UI tests, organising documentation, preparing copy or translations, flowcharts and maintaining information flow in case of dependencies between different teams. Figma is one tool that really grew on me – as the place for design specification, but also a channel for communication between the developers and designers. At the same time it can be easily used to visualise user flows or present early wireframes. Other than that – Confluence, Asana and Jira for documentation and keeping the project running with an overview on the finished user stories.

And again – since you want to validate the impact of the feature, not just ship another thing, treat the release as a start of the test. Some tools can help with that – from in-house baked AB testing frameworks to using 3rd party content management solutions to drive your tests. We have a very nice setup with the mobile team, where we can, with some parts of the app, use Firebase, Contentful and Amplitude to randomize testing variants and create different groups with limited need for dev resources.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome as a PM?

Starting with a personal one – I’m a fairly introverted person and public speaking can be quite a stressful experience for me. At the same time driving product requires not only moderating smaller and bigger meetings with stakeholders, but also more public presentations about team vision, failures and successes to people inside and outside the company. The solution for being stressed and overwhelmed was quite easy – do the public presentations very often, push yourself out of your comfort zone, until it’s no longer a problem.

The biggest product challenge that I remember was my first bigger feature release, that was also changing the major functionality of our mobile app. Happy with the user test validations results during the planning phase, after the release happened, we were looking forward to measure the positive impact. The impact was there, sure, but more on the negative side. While current active users seemed unaffected, it was clear that new users are struggling – engagement and retention metrics were going down significantly. 

The good thing was that we had built this new feature having A/B testing framework in mind. It took us about a week to analyze the tracking data and affected users flows, provide hypotheses on how to fix the unwanted behavior and design and ship experiments to gather hard data. In two weeks after the release we could clearly see that some variants were actually outperforming the old implementation in a significant way – so we went with them. To me the real success of this release was not only that we’ve delivered new functionality and value to the user, but that we could identify so quickly that something is going wrong and react swiftly in an impactful way.

What are your favorite ways to learn more about your users?

When it comes to qualitative research I really like going as close as I can to the concierge test – so basically do the user task for them, with prior training when needed, in the natural customer environment. When nicely structured it has most of the pros of normal user interviews but exceeds when it comes to learnings about the everyday user process problems. It adjusts your perspective and adds, in some cases extremely valuable, context of the user environment. I would love to do it more often. I’ve done it previously with photographers and loved the results. 

Other than that – crunching the behavioral data numbers and conversion flow analysis. Properly tracked user behavior can make all of the user problems more visible and the solutions more achievable. 

How often do you run meetings? How do you run it? Does your team run standups?

As a team we’ve embraced and found value in a couple of agile ceremonies. Due to COVID-19 it was also crucial to migrate all of those meetings online, so that we can continue to keep the level of productivity in the times of working from home.

Daily standup with tickets printed and moved on a whiteboard is now a Slack channel with Olaph bot collecting the standup answers. One upside is that it keeps the discussions focused, since we are using the threads on singular Slack messages – the team is not distracted and seems to like this solution.

Every week we are trying to groom our backlog – it’s the perfect way to keep it clean, estimated, and talk about new ideas that we think can be more impactful than projects on our current roadmap. New gen Jira along with Zoom are helping to make that meeting possible and efficient. 

Every week we are hosting a User Insights session, when the data analyst or product people are presenting insights from the recent user interviews, behavioral data analysis or A/B test results. We want to be as data-informed as possible and utilize the whole team when it comes to looking for more detailed problems and solutions. Those User Insights sessions are designed to keep the information flow as wide as possible.

Every 2 weeks, when the sprint is over, we also run a retrospective. It’s very important to gather feedback and react, when something is going wrong – retrospectives are the team’s emotional buffer that generates tangible actionables to fix the behavior we want to mitigate. Our last retrospective was handled in Zoom, the “whiteboard” for the team to put the retrospective notes was done in Miro. To some extent it worked well, but next time we want to try using Figma instead.  

Every 2 weeks we also have the sprint planning session. With the backlog groomed it should be a relatively quick meeting – we discuss the current roadmap, scope and the main goal of the sprint. We start the sprint as soon as the team is happy with the constellation of tickets.

Does your team use OKRs (objectives and key results)?

Our company moved to an OKR driven process about a year ago. We were doing them quarterly, now we are trying to set them per trimester. I believe that, if thought through, they are a very good tool to focus on important initiatives and can be used as a shield to protect you from distractions and team resource mishandling. Especially if you have many cross-functional initiatives. But I think the most important thing that OKRs are helping to popularize, is the idea that the team should not focus on shipping things, but shipping impact. The key result is measurable, so if the team member, mid-quarter, has an idea that everyone thinks is more impactful and easy to do than the current roadmap, OKR enables us, or makes it easier, to just adjust the roadmap. 

How deeply should product people know about marketing strategy, UX design and coding?

I feel that when it comes to Product Management and a needed skill there is only one answer: “It depends, but for sure it will not hurt to know something about it”. Marketing strategy helps to push for better naming, copy, tackling user and business needs, release plans and so on. UX knowledge enables you to have more valuable conversations with designers, produce more focused wireframes, conduct better user interviews. Coding skills will for example help you understand the complexity of development tasks, technical limitations and opportunities, help you to analyze the data, along with more valuable conversations – this time with the devs. All of those skills will help you to create more precise and understandable user stories, conduct more focused and valuable meetings, and set more impactful strategies. All of those skills will help you to be a more valuable part of the team and a better Product Manager. 

Are they absolutely and crucially needed? Not really. But just the fact that you are asking this question means, to some extent and expertise, that they are more than welcome. 

Do you have coding skills?

As I said I was always interested in technology and coding as a way to interact with it. I Coded my final thesis during psychology studies, made two Android apps afterwards to check how hard it is to push something on my phone and to finish post-graduate studies. I then continued with working on automated tests and tasks. All this helped me to better understand my market domain, opportunities and the team needs. I’m not a developer, but I have enough knowledge to appreciate their work.

What skills do you think would be most valuable to learn and prioritize for an aspiring PM with no technical background?

I think that prioritization is one of the key skills and struggles nowadays – managing stakeholders, input from many sources, keeping the vision clear, team focused and inspired.

As the second one I would nominate the skill to conduct research – qualitative, quantitative and being able to analyze the data, find the patterns, identify the problems for the team to take care.

Then it’s time to communicate – within and outside the team, in tickets, documents, product demos or stakeholders updates. You need to be clear, efficient and convincing. 

About Focus

Focus is an OKRs platform that increases team alignment and performance. You can try Focus for using OKRs, running daily standups and weekly retrospectives. This mix of strategy and tactics allows to align the team each day and keeps focus on what really matters. 

The post Jedrzej Kaminski: About skills for PMs, technologies, A/B testing, meetings, and OKRs appeared first on Focus.

As an entrepreneur or a manager, do you want to build an amazing team that achieves new heights in the business? 

Well, of course, you do… And I wanted the same. The real question is – how to manage the team and increase productivity?

This is the story about problems I had managing my previous startup and why I created the OKR Pulse platform, which gives new tools to better manage the team.

Several words about me

And before starting, I’d like to say several words about my experience. My career started in the Wildberries, which is the largest eCommerce company in Eastern Europe. Then I worked in the oil industry, where I was raised to the Head of a department role. It was a great and very useful period of time when I began to manage the team. At that time, I quickly realized that there are a lot of issues and misunderstandings in team management.

One step further, I exited from the job and created my first business, which was a marketing agency. I had created an amazing team in agency business that converted in Kepler Leads, which is a conversion optimization software. 

I was a pretty experienced entrepreneur, who struggled with the common manager’s problems.

Problems I had as a manager (and I’m not alone in these struggles)

Can you guess what it is?

It was an employee burnout. The employees lost their motivation and the team had a pretty hard time and low level of energy. And it’s a really common problem for people. According to a Gallup survey, 44% of employees reported feeling burned out sometimes. 

There are several reasons why it happens. However, our main problems were the unmanageable workload and the lack of clarity. Especially, people didn’t have a clear vision of why we did what we did. We also had many third side projects because of the lack of focus. We had so many goals that people were overwhelmed. 

Ha, you needed project management software

And, you know, we used project management software to structure all processes. We ran Scrum sprints to iterate quickly and be more effective. I mean we were a really prepared team that used great software and team management framework. 

However, it didn’t help us as much as I wanted. People were losing motivation and it directly impacted the total outcomes.

Our Trello boards were full of tasks and columns. 

See, when I was trying to improve performance, we documented everything to better deliver information about what people should do and all the company’s goals. It didn’t help. 

The real problem

The real problem was the lack of focus on the strategy. You know, sometimes we love to jump into tactics. What should we do today, how can we achieve this goal, and so on. And it was each day. 

I made separate columns on Trello for vision and strategic goals, but it didn’t work well. It was my fault as I should talk about strategy more. In reality, we had strategy goals on Trello, but people didn’t see the connection between those big strategic goals and their daily routines. In a few days after the strategy session, everything returned to the usual mode when we were thinking about new tasks, daily routines, and deadlines. Tactics, tactics, tactics.

It only increased employee burnout. 

How did we survive?

There was no magic button, but in one time we decided to use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) after researching how this goal-setting system has helped tech companies from Intel to Google.

OKRs are a method of setting objectives and tracking key results. It allows you to synchronize the team and focus on the most important things. You literally become to feel like the one team because everyone understands how she or he impacts on team and company’s goals.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Objectives

“It’s like goals served in a fractal manner”

Eric, founder of Pebble

Objectives should be ambitious and inspire the team to achieve new heights. According to Google, objectives should not be achievable 100%. An OKR that was 70% accomplished is a great indicator of an objective. 

Tips for setting objectives:

• Choose from three to five objectives
• Lead to the new achievements
• The team should understand if a result was achieved or not

Key Results

Key results make OKRs more specific. It is specific metrics, which are based on objectives.

Tips for setting key results:

• Write three key results for each objective
• Choose specific key results, which show you achieve the goal
• It should be measurable 

One OKR example from Uber:

What about us?

We survived after OKRs setup. It helped us connect strategic goals (objectives) with tasks that everyone works daily (key results). Team members began to see the outcomes of their daily job. It also focused on the most important goals that we should achieve.

It was the breath of fresh air when the team understood the outcomes of the job. As I said before, OKR was not a magic button, because it took a decent time to implement them. Also, I started to run systematically 1-on-1 meetings with team members, which definitely gave another boost in team engagement. 

There was a mix of several things that helped us to survive and grow the business. However, OKRs played a significant role for us at that time. 

Why did I create OKR software?

We ran OKRs in Google Sheets and tried several OKR platforms, but nothing matched my expectations. Each of these options has pros and cons, but I didn’t find the solution I wanted. I had 2 main criteria for OKRs software:

1. Strategy: it should be easy to set OKRs that everyone understands what’s going on in the company in several clicks (design, dashboards, etc).
2. Tactics: it should push the team not only a strategic vision but also in weekly and daily execution.

OKRs in Google Sheets became too overwhelming because of the lack of opportunities in design. At one time, it stopped being comfortable looking for people’s OKRs in a spreadsheet with too much data.

Other OKRs platforms didn’t match my expectations because of tactics criteria. An OKR software usually has weekly cycles when the team updates their OKRs one time per week. It’s fine. However, I wanted to keep the team’s focus on OKRs not only each week but also each day. I wanted to achieve the best combination of strategy and tactics.

About Focus

That’s why we created Focus, which is the first OKR Pulse platform that gives all tools for managing the team on strategic and tactics layers. 

OKR Pulse = OKR (strategy) + Pulse (daily tactics)

The main concept is setting OKRs and keeping the focus on the main goals each day. Focus keeps teams on the most important outcomes instead of the heap of messages, emails, and endless meetings – focus on what matters the most. 

How does Focus work?

Step 1: Create OKRs

It’s pretty simple to do in Focus. Just identify your objective and key results for it. Everyone will see the company or team’s OKRs. 

By the way, there is a dashboard where you can pin you North Star Metric. It makes magic real when everyone in the company sees the team or company’s main objective or key results.

Step 2: Run Weekly Updates

It’s the showtime now. Each week, your team will get a notification to complete weekly updates, which helps to focus on the most important goals. 

Also, you should update the status of the OKRs you participate in. It allows everyone to see how their work impacts on company outcomes each week.

Step 3: Run Daily Standups

Here is the daily tactics activity, which is called daily standups. It’s short updates with 3 simple questions that align the team and show everyone what’s going on in the team. 

Questions for daily standup:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• Any blockers?

It takes only 5 minutes for team members to complete the standup. In contrast, long status report meetings that cost pretty much for the business if you calculate the time, which employees waste on it. 

Daily standups allow synchronizing the team with OKRs in daily operations. 

Conclusion

That’s it. I shared my story about why I created Focus and why I believe that it’s crucial for a company to build a healthy environment, which helps people to focus on what matters. 

OKRs system is really useful if you find out the right objectives for your organization. It aligns the team and brings team performance to the next level.

You can try Focus for using OKRs and running daily and weekly updates. This mix of strategy and tactics is a very powerful toolkit to not only set strategic objectives but also align the team each day and keeps focus on what really matters. 

The post Founder’s story: Why did I create the OKR software? appeared first on Focus.

Status meetings are a serious waste of time 

The majority of employees hate meetings. A Korn Felly survey reveals that 67% of workers say spending too much time in meetings distracts them from doing their job. On average, 15% of an organization’s time is spent in meetings.

At the same time, we see that management is changing. Frederic Laloux in his book “Reinventing organizations” describes that powered authority based paradigm evolutes to relationships and people paradigm where the more teams are lead by values and purposes, not hierarchy formal roles. Self-management companies are the next stage in management evolution. 

Companies move away from costly status meetings that people don’t like to more lightweight solutions, especially in remote companies where a team should have a high level of self-management. Building a high-performing culture is a hard deal where managers should understand how to create strong communication and processes across the company.

Focus bot for standups and employee recognition in Slack

We launched a Focus bot that brings your communication in Slack to the next level. 

After talking with many teams, we had a clear view of status meetings and communication in companies. For project managers, it’s crucial to understand what’s going on in the team each day without long meetings or Zoom calls. For scrum master, it’s vital to run daily standups and build a culture of a self-organizing team. For teams, it’s better to go away from endless meetings and to be aligned across an organization to produce the highest outcomes. 

We believe that lightweight scrum meetings (aka daily standups) are a more effective way for teams to stay in sync without wasting time. You can learn more about scrum meetings and how it works in this article.

How to install Focus bot

• Install the bot to your Slack workspace. It takes less than a minute. Just click on the button ‘Add to Slack’ and allow the bot to do its job. You should only have an account in Focus before adding the bot in your Slack workspace. If you don’t have an account, then you might sign up here and return to Slack installation later.
• Edit settings (optional). You can change the time for running standups or questions. Also, you might choose channels for reports delivery or use asynchronous standups. You can perform these and other actions in settings as an admin.
• Using the bot. The Focus bot begins to work after installation. It will run daily standups and weekly updates according to your settings.

It’s not only about scrum meetings

We believe that employee recognition is another crucial area for building a great culture in the company. And yeah, Focus bot gives you leverage for using regular opportunities for creating an amazing atmosphere in the team. It helps your employees to be recognized for their accomplishments through the Focus platform.

Read the guide to get more details about Focus bot and how it works in Slack. 

The post Meet Focus bot for Slack appeared first on Focus.

There is a focus on high-quality of product development in Scrum methodology. That’s why scrum meetings have high priority and run by a scrum master. The main goal of the scrum meeting is team synchronization. 

Who is a scrum master?

The better definition of a scrum master role is “servant leader”. 

Scrum master’s goal is to help a team increase efficiency by:

• Solving the problems that are discussed in the scrum meetings
• Learning. A scrum master has the crucial role of onboarding new members into the team
• Motivation. The experienced scrum master creates a feeling of belonging. They highlight something valuable for each team member to take away after scrum meetings.
• Asking the right questions. How to do better what we are doing well right now? What kind of processes doesn’t add value to our product? 

A scrum master is responsible for the development velocity and time scales of launching products. 

Also, a scrum master together with the product owner and team members plans the sprint that the team will do. Jeff Sutherland, the author of the book “The Scrum Book”, says that a scrum master is the head of the team.

Ideal scrum master

Some teams do experiments and create a monthly scrum master rotation where everyone can become a scrum master for a month. However, if you take a look at the list of scrum master skills and responsibilities, you quickly figure out that it’s not a good way to organize the work.

Ideal scrum master skills:

• Encourage discussion – scrum, retrospectives, and sprints will not be effective without open discussion inside the team. The goal of a scrum master is to encourage this kind of communication using all types of methods and tools for it (company’s Wiki, messengers, project management software, etc). 

• Removing barriers to successful project completion – create and improve communication methods (for instance, create team knowledge base), complete daily routine jobs for team traction (update process diagrams, etc), solve team members problems after scrum meetings.
• To be a scrum evangelist – scrum master understands scrum better than anyone in the team, he/she teaches people and helps to get the best results from the methodology.
• Deliver project vision – this skill complements the motivation role, this is especially crucial in long-term projects with a lot of sprints.
• Solve conflicts – the truth is born in an argument, but conflicts create hurt and aggression. A scrum master prevents toxic communication and conflicts to build constructive criticism.  

What is a scrum meeting?

Scrum meeting or daily standups are a crucial tool of Scrum methodology. It’s a daily meeting, which is moderated by a scrum master and usually runs in the mornings. 

During daily standups, team members talk or write down answers to three simple questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What was your blocks or obstacles?

Scrum meetings help to synchronize the teamwork and much more:

• Align the team and project vision – everyone understands how the project is moving and sees that the amount of obstacles has diminished;
• Set actual goals and response for the status of the project;
• Build the team – people learn to hear other employees and understand their goals and motives;
• Find out the best solution for the job.

Differences between scrum standup and meetup?

Standups (or scrum meetings) and meetups have different meanings despite similar names. A meetup is an event with unfamiliar people who are interested in the meetup theme. People in daily standups know each other pretty well because they are working in one company.  

Other differences between scrum standups and meetup:

5 usual scrum mistakes 

1. Scrum meetings are only for the scrum master: as the scrum master leads the meeting, a participant might look only to the scrum master and answer him while other members take care of their deals. It’s not a productive environment and the scrum master’s goals are to build connection “speaker – other members.”
2. Daily standups are for planning – the new task might be born on the daily standup and there is a huge desire to start discussing it right away in the scrum meeting. Don’t do it. Run 15-min daily standup and then create a new meeting for discussing the new tasks.
3. Daily standups are for technical questions – one of the participants might know about the technical side more than others. Focusing the discussion on technical details doesn’t help you to achieve scrum goals. It takes the meeting in the wrong direction.
4. Scrum meeting is not run on the workspace – the ideal place for running daily standup is near scrum board (board of tasks or Gantt chart) because it allows the team to better understand current statuses and traction. 
5. Scrum meeting with 2 questions – using only 2 questions “What did I do yesterday?” and “What am I going to do today?” People don’t like to talk about problems and blockers, especially in the group meeting, not 1-on-1 meetings. However, it’s crucial to discuss problems in the scrum meetings to close the sprint successfully.

How to run scrum meetings?

A team runs scrum meetings every day. That’s why it is also called daily scrum or daily standups. Meetings are usually run in the same place and have a time limit, which is 15 minutes. This limit helps to stop participants from discussing insignificant themes and allows standups to be more productive.

During a daily standup, each member answers 3 questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What’re blockers do you have?

Focus on the status of the jobs allows the team to align and understands how much the team must do to finish the sprint. If the developer says “I am going to finish the module for the database today”, the other participants will figure out results the next day.

Problems are a scrum master’s responsibility. He/she chooses when to solve it – either in the scrum meeting if it’s a small issue or if it’s something more significant a note will be added to their schedule. 

Usual obstacles that team members have:

• A broken laptop
• The team member hasn’t got the software that he or she needs for work
• One of the departments asks a member to work on another problem for a couple of days
• A member needs help with software installation

How to run a scrum meeting correctly

1. Limit the total amount of participants up to 6 people on the daily standup. If the team has more people in the project then it’s better to divide members into several groups where each of the groups has its own scrum master. Usually, groups are created by jobs such as the Quality Assurance group, Engineers group, etc. 
2. Solve urgent problems – some problems are critical and you should solve them asap. It’s better to run the meeting without a 15-minute limit to allow for the top-priority problem. A scrum master decides how long your meeting should be. 
3. Write down daily scrum rules – they should be clear for everyone and be easily accessible (for example, rules are on the board).
4. Stop personal discussions – talking about last night’s football game, problems with parking or new premiers are taking time away from your 15-min meeting. The scrum master’s goal is to focus the team on the right conversation and avoid digressing with additional topics.
5. Create a productive format – for example, if you run lengthy meetings, start doing standups. If participants aren’t initiated, use gamification – for example, suggest to a team member, who answered 3 questions, to throw the ball to a random participant who will be the next speaker.
6. Ask additional questions if it’s necessary – if a team member hasn’t verbalized any problems, ask him or her “How confident are you in completing this task today?” This question helps participants to better understand their statuses and presents an opportunity for team members to clarify objectives and feel confident in their assigned tasks. 
7. Run meetings at the same time – do it even if half of the participants haven’t turned up. It teaches them discipline and shows that it’s important for you to run daily meetings. That’s why a scrum master can’t be late.
8. Appreciate participants at the end of daily standups – it puts your team in a good mood first thing in the morning and increases motivation. Don’t turn this rule into a formality.

*Gamification is using game mechanics (raising experience, fights with monsters, the game field, etc) in non-game processes like work, life, study.

The summary

A scrum master is required for team coordination.

It’s not even about observing scrum rules, it’s all about the need to have an advocate of project goals in scrum meetings. The correspondence of the core product architecture, team building and creating a productive atmosphere in the company with constant growth are the main jobs of a scrum master.

Scrum meetings are a great tool for measuring statuses and project promotion. Daily standups not only help the team to stay in sync but also help to solve problems, are a place to learn to set goals and to be responsible for the overall result in front of the group.

The post Scrum Master: How to run Scrum Meetings with a Team? appeared first on Focus.