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.

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.

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 is a story about how we increased team performance and the quality of work by using OKR. Here are the topics of the article:

• What is OKR?
• Weaknesses of OKRs
• Benefits of OKRs
• Top 3 mistakes in OKRs
• How to use OKRs

It was several years ago when we began using OKRs in the company Kepler Leads, which is a conversion rate optimization software. Being a CEO at Kepler Leads, I struggled with crucial problems in management, which were losing focus and decreasing team motivation. 

The team didn’t see the main picture and didn’t understand why they did what they were doing at that time. There were many side projects in the development because we didn’t have a clear focus. Employee engagement was very low. It was a classic team management problem.

Then, we began to use OKRs and we have come a long way from the “it doesn’t work for us” stage to the “wow, it works and it’s amazing” stage. At that time, my friends from other companies, which saw our results, asked me to help them to implement OKRs too. This was the moment when Focus was born. 

In this article, I will share the main mistakes companies usually make trying to implement OKRs and how to set them in real life, not just in theory.  

It’s crucial to say, however, that OKRs don’t fit everyone. It’s not a magic stick that empowers your organization and makes a dream team. OKR is a framework, which has strengths and weaknesses.

Before speaking about strengths and how to set OKRs, I want to mention the main OKRs strengths and weaknesses.

OKR weaknesses

• It’s hard to implement. There are two reasons why it isn’t easy to set in the company. First, making inspirational and ambitious objectives is not as simple as it may seem. Second, not everyone likes to use new things in life or work. At the same time, it’s crucial for OKRs implementation that people in the team want to set ambitious objectives for themselves. People can hesitate about trying something new and end up going away because it’s easy to keep everything as usual. 
• Implementation and setting OKRs take up a lot of time. Discussing objectives, team meetings, attaining the consensus, choosing the right key results, and defining really inspirational objectives, destructuring companies objectives to the teams… All of that needs time and you cannot set objectives top-down because OKRs don’t work like that. Otherwise, it will not be OKRs.
• The Psychological barrier when the person doesn’t complete the goal. An OKR that was accomplished at 70% is a great indicator. However, not everyone likes it. For some people, it’s crucial to complete the goal at 100% or they will think that they didn’t work well or hard enough.

OKR benefits

• In our expertise, a team increases its engagement. The managers begin to see the fire in employees’ eyes because of interesting goals, which they set for themselves.
• OKRs increases transparency in the teams. Everyone begins to understand how his or her job impacts the total result. Also, it helps employees see what their colleagues do and why it matters for a company. 
• It gives clear focus. We stopped doing different side projects, which grabbed our attention and focused on the main things for the company. It’s hard to achieve ideal focus (probably, impossible) because you always have operations like customers’ requests or bug fixing, which take your attention. However, we see that using OKRs helps teams to understand the main focus and make decisions based on core things. 

 If these benefits are important for you, then you should take a look at OKRs.

What is OKR?

Few words about what OKR means.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is the methodology for setting the goals, which is used in companies like Google, LinkedIn, Uber, etc. It aligns the teams with transparent goals and metrics. Using OKRs, a team sets goals bottom-up and it helps increase employee’s engagement because people feel more responsibility when they create their own goals

An objective is a big and very ambitious goal, which should motivate the team. It’s not a SMART goal. It’s more about vision and inspiration for everyone.

An ambitious goal means that it’s really hard to achieve 100% of it. For instance, 60%-70% achievement is the best result for an objective in Google. 100% OKR achievement shows that that objective was too simple. 40% or less tells you that you either didn’t plan it well or you didn’t achieve a solid execution.

And yeah, ambitious goals mean that you should not calculate employees’ bonuses based on achieving OKRs. If you connect bonuses with OKRs, then employees will not set ambitious goals for themselves to be sure of completing objectives.

An objective doesn’t have metrics and it’s hard to understand how well it is achieved. At this moment, Key Results are coming to help us, which are the other letters in the OKR acronym.

Key Results make an objective countable. They are the metrics that display traction and how much is left.

A team might choose either one key result or several. It’s crucial to set fewer key results. The ideal amount of key results is three, with five results the maximum. The less is better. It allows the team to focus on what matters. 

OKRs examples

Objective: Achieve record acquiring new customers

Key Results: 

• 25,000 signups
• Keep CAC on the same level $20
• Increase Visitor-to-Trial conversion rate from 5% to 10%

Objective: Close maximum deals

Key Results: 

• 100 new companies
• Increase market share from 10% to 15%
• Hit quarterly revenue of $500,000 

Objective: Make clients love our service

Key Results: 

• Reduce average response time from 20 to 5 minutes
• Reduce average closing tickets time from 40 to 12 hours
• Increase NPS to 80%

Top 3 mistakes in OKRs

Mistake #1: too simple or too complex OKRs

We did it twice in the beginning. At the first iteration, we had the second worst OKR:

Objective: Triple sales

Key Results: 

• Get new 1000 leads in Q1
• Increase trial-to-customer conversion from 10% to 30%
• Hit $100,000

What’s wrong: There are 2 crucial mistakes. Objectives shouldn’t be measurable and must be more realistic. In this period of time with the resources we had, there was no real way to achieve triple sales in a quarter even for 50% achievements.  

How it should be: 

Objective: Achieve the sales record

Key Results: 

• Increase the number of monthly leads from 100 to 200
• Increase trial-to-customer conversion from 10% to 30%
• Hit $20,000

Setting the right OKRs is the most difficult part of implementing this framework. Also, I saw a lot of times when a team chose very low goals and finished at 100%. Here is an example of this case:

Objective: Launch eCommerce shop

Key Results: 

• Make a store design
• Create a website 
• Sign contracts with 5 suppliers 

What’s wrong: This objective doesn’t inspire a lot and doesn’t link to the more important key results. 

How it should be: 

Objective: Get first sales in the new store

Key Results: 

• Launch eCommerce store in Q1
• Sign contracts with 5 suppliers 
• Get 50 sales in Q2 

The right goal setting is always a balance between identifying ambitious, but possible goals.  

Mistake #2: Too many key results

We prefer to choose 3 key results for an objective. A team might lose focus with four or more key results. It’s better to keep the focus on a few metrics in a month/quarter for achieving better outcomes. However, it depends on the team size. 

Here are some examples of bad OKRs:

Objective: Achieve the sales record

Key results: 

• Attract 1000 new leads from Google ads
• Increase trial-to-customer conversion rate from 10% to 30%
• Reduce CAC from $30 to $15
• Attend 10 conferences 
• Increase LTV up to 50%
• Start sales in 3 countries

What’s wrong: Each of these key results requires a pretty solid time for testing many hypotheses. As a result, we didn’t execute it well because of the loss of focus.

How it should be: 

Objective: Achieve the sales record

Key Results: 

• Attract 1000 new leads from Google ads
• Increase trial-to-customer conversion rate from 10% to 30%
• Maintain CAC below $30 

Mistake #3: dependencies from other teams

We don’t recommend setting goals that have direct dependencies from another team. For instance, we had several cases when 2 teams set one OKR, together. Afterward, one of the teams stopped working on it during the cycle because of some internal issues and priorities. It became hard for the second team to achieve because it couldn’t complete the whole objective alone. 

Not good key result: Increase NPS from 50 to 60

Much better key result: Increase monthly retention from 30% to 40%

We learned that it’s better to not track NPS in OKR because NPS is a very slow metric. It takes a decent amount of time to correctly measure it. The team usually doesn’t have the time to change NPS and measure it in quarters. In that case, it’s better to track monthly retention than NPS. 

How to implement OKRs

The first rule is to understand why your team needs OKR. Setting OKRs takes time and team alignment. Often, it’s not easy to do the first time. You should remember why you want to do it while you are setting OKRs. 

Bad reasons to set up OKRs:

• “Let’s try it because everyone uses it”
• “We need OKRs because Google uses it”

Good reasons to set up OKRs:

• “We want to increase the team’s alignment in each level”
• “We want to improve employee engagement”
• “We want to focus everyone on strategic goals”

5 steps to set up OKRs

1. Executives identify yearly and quarterly company’s OKRs.
2. Teams identify its OKRs on a quarterly basis with the company’s OKRs. Team leads discuss with their people how they can contribute to the company’s objectives.
3. Teams set the monthly goals depending on their quarter OKRs.
4. A team updates the status of OKRs weekly or bi-weekly.
5. At the end of the quarter, a team runs the retrospective meeting where members analyze the traction and set new OKRs for the next quarter.

OKRs lead the game

It’s time for our conclusion. OKRs are not a magic tablet that gets jobs done. It’s a continuous process of searching for balance with ambition and reality while setting objectives. 

It’s also crucial to remember that a team should work with OKRs at least once every 2 weeks. I will share details on how to work with OKRs in future articles.

There are two types of companies with OKRs – the ones that tried to set OKRs and gave up and others that were successful in setting them up. In our case, OKRs increased focus and engagement inside the organization. It’s hard to imagine working without OKRs now. We’re using some modifications in goals, however, not pure OKRs. I’ll share that later.

Finally, we created Focus, a tool that keeps teams on top of their priorities every day. Try Focus for free to start working smarter.

The post What is OKR and why everyone talks about it 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.

Scrum standup is a daily meeting that helps product teams to be more effective and analyze their routines. The recommended length of the meeting is 15 minutes, however, it depends on the team size. All members of the product team participate in the standups, not only the product owner and scrum master.

Scrum meetings or Daily Standups might help product owner to optimize development and prepare the product for the launch without delays and issues. It’s a beautiful theory. In reality, effective and short scrum standups can turn into nightmare routine where no one understands what’s going on in the team. How to run really effective daily meetings?

The main goal of the meeting in Scrum is sharing the statuses of the work for each member. During the standup, everyone tells about the current situation in the job to align the team and create a total vision.

There are no tables and сhairs on the scrum meeting. It’s called standup and attendees participate while standing to make this meeting as short as possible. Difficult and long questions might be discussed after the meeting between a team leader and member who has the issues, but not with the whole team.

Nowadays, scrum meetings sometimes are considered outdated and are criticized by some companies. However, scrum standups generally are very popular across development teams. Product owners claim that standups help them to manage the team more effectively.

Running effective scrum meetings is not a unique skill for product owners. It’s possible to understand how it works, practice, and improve its power. The following recommendations will help product owners and scrum master to run the best standups.

8 simple recommendations to run standups effectively

1. Define the meeting format 

In Agile, standup meetings run while the sprint that is usually 2-4 weeks period. The team should specify the set of features and requirements from the backlog for the iteration.

An important goal of the daily standups is defining a timeframe for the meetings and remember that standup is not a usual meeting or retrospective meeting. 

2. Invite the team and define the roles

The best solution for the scrum meeting is the team of 8-12 people. It simplifies communication and makes it short. 3 main roles should be on the scrum meeting:

• Scrum master, who plays as a coach and helps the team to optimize processes and jobs;
• A product owner or product manager who prioritizes the features and communicates with clients and experts;
• The development team consists of members with different roles and responsibilities (developers, marketers, support managers, etc).

Other people like remote employees or partners might be are invited to the meetings. However, it’s better to restrain the total number of the meeting as it improves trust and confidence inside the team.

3. Choose the type of standups

There are two main types of standups you could run. The first one is the usual type for a team in an office. People gather in a room in a specific time and run synchronous standup. However, not everyone might be able to be in the office at a specific time, especially, it doesn’t work for remote teams. 

The second type of standups is an asynchronous meeting where the team uses a messenger or a special tool like Standuply or Focus for running events. At this type, team members send answers to the bot and managers receive daily reports with all information in Slack or web application. 

4. Pick up the time and place

There are no special requirements for the place where you can run standups. The board with stickers or displays with a special tool can be useful for the meeting but it’s not crucial. You need an empty area for offline meetings or communication software for running standups online. For running the asynchronous standups you might use special tools from the previous rule. 

Experts recommend running standups each day at the same time. Morning is the best time for scrum meetings because it helps everyone to prioritize daily goals. 

5. Participate while standing

Meetings where you participate while standing helps to focus on the main goals and run the event shortly. Some creative teams run standups while they doing some exercises like planks. You should choose the best option for you to run short and effective meetings.

6. Follow the day agenda

Daily scrum meetings follow 3 main questions that everyone should answer:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What are the blockers or obstacles?

Answering these simple questions, the team can find out the problems that they must solve or optimize. It’s the best way to align the team and get areas for improvements. 

Don’t forget to take notes and share information with the team or use bots for standups that made it for you.

7. Simplify the process

It’s useful to visualize day agenda that everyone could see current tasks. You might use a kanban board that helps to prioritize daily goals and statuses. Here are a couple of examples of how you can use boards:

It’s crucial to see deadlines, the list of tasks your team should do, and what should you decline while it’s not a priority. In this case, the product owner should use some of the prioritization techniques. 

8. Communication and partnerships

Remember that daily standup is a valuable time where everyone participates in the process. Each team member should share the most valuable information for the team. The right communication is a core for productivity. A Scrum Master or Product Owner should stop useless communication to make the meeting more helpful.  

Avoid usual mistakes

There are most frequent mistakes on the scrum meetings: 

• A long period of waiting. You should explicitly follow the timeframe. Start standups in the same period. Don’t wait for everyone. If someone is late – it’s his or her fault.
• New ideas and topics. Daily standups are not about planning. It’s a meeting for sharing the statuses of the work.
• Vague and long speech. Long and vague speeches reduce the efficiency of the meeting. Focus on things that matter to the company and team members. 

There is no secret sauce in these recommendations, but it can help you to build high-performing meetings in a scrum team. Thinking about the team and focusing on the main things, the product owner can run useful and interesting 15 minutes meetings where everyone wants to participate. 

To run asynchronous standups and retrospectives, you can try Focus that helps teams stay in sync and work better together.

The post 8 Key Rules on How to run Better Scrum Meetings appeared first on Focus.

Who is a scrum master?

Scrum master is one of the underestimated roles in Scrum and Agile. A lot of teams combine a scrum master role with other roles like a developer or a Q&A engineer because they don’t know how to give to a scrum master a full-time job. 

It’s the most popular mistake in the scrum master role. Companies generally say, “We know that team members should create the product and work hard. We should help each other and be flexible. We also think that a product owner is a crucial member of the team because he defines the product vision and communicates with clients. What’s about a scrum master? What does he or she do?” 

In this scenario, a scrum master usually becomes a secretary, which is a very boring position, isn’t it? A scrum master moves cards on the scrum board and thinking about making coffee to the team while they create the product. Familiar situation? ?

Another popular mistake usually happens in enterprise companies when someone brings a scrum master role in the team and starts to combine his or her main job with scrum master activities. Companies, which decided to go to scrum, say, “We need to have a scrum master to implement scrum, right? But we can’t use a developer or Q&A engineer for that, because they should create the product.” In this case, a company chose a shy person who combines his main job with a scrum master role because he doesn’t have great skills in development.

Talking about it, Zuzana says that the strong scrum master is not considered as an optional role, who can’t add solid value to the project. The scrum master must be considered as a person who produces efficiency team growth. The goal of scrum master role is building not a good team, but building the high-performing team. In this case, the scrum master is the guy who has a very fast return on investments. 

Scrum master responsibilities

Let’s talk about scrum master responsibilities. There are many things that scrum master should do and all of them participate a lot in teamwork. If a scrum master combines several roles in the team, then each role should be separated from the main. A scrum master should choose only one role at a particular time. A scrum master, in contrast, who doesn’t separate his roles, can’t be good in all of his or her roles. 

Scrum master responsibilities include things such as: 

• Motivate the team to take responsibility and align each member across personal and team goals
• Provide transparency and partnerships
• Remove obstacles by encouraging the team to be proactive
• Understand agile and scrum mindset and be always learning
• Keep agile values and help other people to understand scrum values
• If it is necessary, protect the development team
• Help the team to be more effective
• Facilitate scrum meetings and standups

As you can see, a scrum master has a lot of responsibilities. However, it’s hard to compare with any traditional role and many people can’t understand what’s scrum master doing the whole day. 

Outstanding scrum masters should always improve their soft skills and be great listeners. Also, they should be experts in Agile and Scrum. The perfect scrum master has work experience in a scrum team. On the other hand, a scrum master will struggle with agile implementation in the company without this experience.

Scrum master goals 

What’s the main scrum master goal? It’s building a self-organizing team and produce self-organization as a key value of the company in all areas. Self-organization creates engagement, responsibilities, and make people more engaged. It helps the team to find its solutions and make the team more effective. Self-organization is a key indicator of a high-performing team in a long-term period, not in the short-term. It allows improving processes, communication, and partnership. Self-organization creates high-engaged employees and helps people to build a solid team with aligned goals and identity.  

If a scrum master focuses on other goals instead of building a self-organizing team, then he or she turns out to be secretaries, consultants, managers, or just not valuable team members who “doesn’t know what to do”. 

Remember

• Scrum master is not a secretary;
• Scrum master is not a ‘not necessary role’, but a person who creates a high-performing team;
• Scrum master is an agile and scrum expert who truly believe that agile and Scrum are ways to success.

About Focus

Focus is a teamwork software for scrum teams. Focus helps your company to run scrum meetings and stay in sync.

The post Great Scrum Master appeared first on Focus.