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.

Stop wasting your time on team meetings. Asynchronous communication is one of the core principles why remote work is effective. 

A growing number of remote companies last year proved dozens of reports about remote work. Employee productivity increases during work from home. For example, Stanford’s research and Cisco’s study told the same.

Why?

Asynchronous communication.

In this article, we will talk about the most important things that make teams’ communication productive:

• What is asynchronous and synchronous communications
• Benefits of asynchronous meetings
• Why you should focus on asynchronous meetings (and should you do it?)
• When you should use synchronous communication (and why you can’t eliminate it)
• 3 steps how to run effective meetings 
• Examples of meetings for asynchronous and synchronous communication
• How to balance both types of communication: status meeting example

Seems a lot? Yeah, true. However, it’s a short guide on how to build communication in your team to increase productivity.

Let’s start with the basics.

What’s asynchronous communication?

Asynchronous communication is a way of communication when you don’t expect to get an immediate answer to your message. For example, email is asynchronous communication.

As opposite, synchronous communication is communication when the recipient is waiting for an immediate answer. The real-time meeting is an example of pure synchronous communication.

However, digital forms of communication might be synchronous too. For example, real-time answering in a messenger becomes synchronous. 

If you want to learn more about both types of communication, you can read our article What is Asynchronous Communication?

Benefits of asynchronous communication?

Better control of the time. As the result, employees are more happier and productive. Employees have almost full control over how to plan their day and schedule. Some of them prefer to work at night, others like to work in the morning. Also, it helps to find a better work-life balance because employees might spend mornings with their children and do work later.

Better quality of communication. Asynchronous communication is slower. However, many companies admit that the quality of communication is higher. People learn to discuss the topic without empty conversations. They have time to think about a question and give a deep and thoughtful answer. 

Better planning = less stress. People learn how to plan like a pro because now they can’t do everything at the last minute. They can’t send ASAP messages to co-workers because response takes time. It leads us to more effective scheduling to complete everything according to the plans. It reduces pressure and the job is done in a better way.

Deep work by default. It’s not necessary to jump on Slack or another communication tool to check messages each hour. Co-workers can check messages 1-3 times per day and get more time for focused work which increases productivity.  

Why should you focus on asynchronous communication?

The benefits of asynchronous meetings speak for themselves. Add to it the cost of synchronous communication and you will get the combo.

According to an article on Inc.com, more than $37 billion is spent on unproductive meetings every year! 

The cost of update meeting

The monthly cost of a weekly status update meeting for a team of 8 people is near $1k.

Duration: 30 minutes
Team: 8 people
Salaries: from $50k to $120k (1 – $50k, 1 -$60k, 3 – $70k, 2 – $90k, 1 – $120k)
The total cost of weekly meeting: $217
Total monthly cost: $868

It means that the cost of weekly update meetings for a team of 8 people is $10k per year. But let’s be honest, this meeting can go more than 30 minutes. 

It’s the main reason why you should eliminate the amount of real-time communication. Peter Arvai, a CEO and Co-founder Prezi, also tells that the async meetings will be the future of work.

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. 

3 steps how to run meetings in a better way

Step 1: Identify when to start async first

The first step is an understanding type of meetings that really important to keep in real-time mode. And what’s better to use in an asynchronous way. Here are recommendations from GitLab, which we completely agree on. It’s best to avoid real-time meetings for the following items:

• Status updates
• FYIs and process documentation
• Meeting about a meeting

Step 2: Set the agenda and talking points

If you don’t have agenda – you spend the company’s resources to empty meetings. “Jump on a quick call” without agenda might sound good for the participant but it’s counterproductive. 

Always set agenda and talking points that every participant understands the reason for the meeting.

All meetings must have an agenda and a documentarian, enabling everyone to contribute asynchronous regardless of time zone or availability.

Darren Murph, Head of Remote in Gitlab

At Focus, we realized that it’s not necessary to do each morning video standup call. It’s more efficient to run daily check-ins in an asynchronous way. Here is how it looks.

It takes few minutes to answer the main questions. For daily check-ins, you can ask the next items:

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

Step 3: To document takeaways 

If you run real-time meetings, don’t forget to document highlights after the meeting. If you do it in an asynchronous way, you have already documented it. Congrats!

The main point is to make takeaways after meeting to sync the team. It will help to be more accountable and productive in the next steps. Paul Axtell recommends doing these 2 things to recap meetings.

Examples of asynchronous and synchronous meetings.

Asynchronous meetings:

• Daily check-ins
• Weekly status updates
• Weekly announcements
• Monthly updates
• Quarterly team results recaps and celebrations
• Project sprints and milestones
• Backlog refinement
• New team member introduction
• Missed deliverable retrospective
• Alternate times for recurring scheduled meetings (for people who can’t attend synchronous meetings because of different timezones)

Synchronous meetings: 

• Sales calls
• Direct reports (1:1 meetings)
• Celebrations and retrospectives 
• First-time meetings with external parties
• First-time meetings with team members who have not previously worked together
• Difficult decisions for important topics (e.g. when stakes are high)

How to sync a team (daily check-ins case)

Let’s talk about specific use cases. 

How can the team use asynchronous daily standups to sync the team? There are 4 ways of running updates: 

Synchronous

1. Video calls. You can use Zoom, Google Meets, or another software. 

Pros:

• The main benefit of this way of updates is face-to-face communication. You get real-time statuses in the morning and then go back to work. 

Cons: 

• You don’t document your current statuses, which means that you don’t have a history of what you did last week. Don’t have history – you can’t analyze your productivity and find points for improvement. 
• You spend more time compare with async meetings. Everyone should wait until the end of the meeting. Compare it with async check-ins when everyone answers 3 questions (2-3 minutes) and reads the answers of coworkers. Usually, it takes few minutes because speed reading faster than speed talking.  
• Less quality of information compares with written updates.
• Not good for co-workers in different timezones

Asynchronous

2. Manually gather updates in Slack or any other messenger. 

Pros:

• Free
• You have written answers, which is much better than only conversations.
• High quality of answers

Cons:

• You should remind co-workers who haven’t sent an update
• Resources for managing it
• Don’t have analytics (only text answers)
• Still not good for different timezone because someone should manage this process

3. Special standup bot. It’s a bot that runs standups in Slack or MS Team.

Pros:

• Hight quality of answers 
• Written answers
• Integration with Slack and MS Teams
• Automate notification and reminders
• Have analytics
• Good for different timezones
• Reports

Cons:

• Using the whole tool only for this specific process

4. Team management pulse software Focus. 

Pros:

• Hight quality of answers 
• Written answers
• Integration with Slack
• Automate notification and reminders
• Have analytics
• Good for different timezones
• Connected with 1:1 meetings and goals
• Keep a history of goals’ progress and daily check-ins
• Connected with employee development plans
• Get feedback from employees
• Running all kind of async meetings
• Email reports

Cons:

• New tool (even if it’s simple)

Daily check-ins in Focus

How to balance both types of communication for daily check-ins?

Some teams don’t want to run async check-ins because they don’t want to lose personal communication. But status updates meeting is not designed for personal communication. 

How the hell should we run all meetings asynchronously now?

And you will be right – it’s not healthy to stop running synchronous meetings because of 3 main struggles of remote work: disconnecting, loneliness, and communication. You should keep using synchronous meetings but do it wisely.

Here is the better way of running asynchronous daily check-ins and team synchronous meetings:

1. You run daily check-ins asynchronously (choose one of three methods above you to prefer more)
2. And now you set group calls for solving key issues and questions if you want to keep the personal connection. Otherwise, you can use async communication even for solving problems. 

In this case, you don’t waste your valuable time gathering updates. You run asynchronous check-ins to gather this information. And now, you spend your time in synchronous meetings for making an important decision or solving problems. This is the most convenient and cost-effective way to run meetings in this case. 

Conclusion

Asynchronous communication still is not a common process for businesses. Many teams prefer to jump on a call to discuss their current statuses or sharing weekly announcements. It’s a legacy they have from the pre-COVID time when inefficiency was a frequent fact for many businesses.

I’m sure that more success will get companies that are ready to change and be more effective in processes. Teams that don’t require employees to be always in touch, allow asynchronous communication, increase the time of focused work. And create self-organized teams where employees are responsible for results. 

We are happy to invite you to this journey.

The post Asynchronous Communication: How To Run Meetings 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.

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.

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.