Sync-Ups Are an Engineering Essential. Here’s How 6 Leaders Have Effective Ones.

Sync-ups are an engineering essential. Since many engineers work in fast-paced environments, team huddles allow them time to outline priorities, share progress updates and address roadblocks — and they’re expected to be as focused and succinct as possible. Yet, leading an effective sync-up is not always easy, especially while remote. 

Engineering leaders across Colorado have discovered several ways to run effective team sync-ups. For some, that meant shifting responsibilities and changing the cadence of team huddles. For others, efficiency required asynchronous written standups via Slack. 

As many teams continue to work from home, these huddles have become increasingly important. By encouraging collaboration, engagement and agility, engineering leaders can get the most out of their team sync-ups, despite the social distance. 

 

According to Forbes, the cannabis industry is one of the world’s fastest-growing. Wurk wants to help its people thrive. The company’s HR platform enables cannabis employers to protect and streamline their operations while prioritizing their employees. 

Head of Product Brian Wones shared how he and his team get the most out of their daily syncs, and why they think it’s better to meet at the end of the day than the beginning.

 

What does a typical sync-up look like for your team, and how do you structure those meetings to ensure they're as effective/productive as possible? 

Traditionally, daily engineering standups happen at the start of the day. However, at Wurk, our team of engineering, operations, HCM and IT managers meet at the end of each day. Our afternoon virtual meetings allow us to review new opportunities, roadblocks and exciting discoveries that happen throughout the day, as opposed to trying to plan for an evolving day in the morning. As a small startup team, we also agreed that this is our optimal time for individual awareness, productivity and communication. 

A daily standup allows for real-time feedback and updates, so challenges can quickly be solved. As a hyper-growth startup in the ever-changing cannabis industry, the frequency of standups allows us to adapt and respond to shifting priorities while remaining organized and communicating effectively. 

 

What's one thing you've done to improve the effectiveness of your stand-up meetings? What were the results?

In addition to daily standups, the Wurk engineering team meets biweekly for high-level sprint planning. If there are changes in goals or project direction, our department can come together to review objectives, ensuring the outcomes meet the expectations of leadership. Where traditional sprints expose detailed tasks over long-term projects, biweekly sprints provide smaller goals that require summarized status updates. This approach enables the team to be autonomous and encourages rapid decision-making, therefore improving employee satisfaction and adaptability. From a management perspective, this offers more opportunities to strategically lead and build trust with my team, as I’m not spending time addressing individual tasks and micromanaging. 

 

The subject matter varies enough to create thought-provoking discussion.” 

What's one strategy you've found to be critical for keeping employees engaged throughout these meetings?

While the agenda remains the same each day, the subject matter varies enough to create thought-provoking discussion and creative solutions. In addition to standard stand-up topics like progress updates, discoveries and roadblocks, we sometimes discuss strategic projects such as setting quarterly goals, reviewing a tech demo and updating dashboard views. Scheduling dedicated time for an engineer is critical to ensure they have consistency as well as space to focus without interruption. We use a portion of our standup to address strategic items, so we’re not scheduling additional meetings, which protects their time. Less meetings throughout the week results in more productive, engaging conversations when we are together.  

 

For franchise businesses, having a solid digital marketing strategy is key to attracting and retaining customers. Location3 helps them do this with its proprietary platform, which integrates client data in order to scale digital marketing for franchise systems and multi-location businesses. 

Director of Engineering at Location3 Henry Dittmer told us how he’s keeping his team engaged and connected through what he thinks of as “mullet meetings.” We’ll explain later.

 

What does a typical sync-up look like for your team? 

We use a few different sync-up agendas, which follow the Agile methodology. The daily standups have a focused agenda of new issue summary, daily task goals, issue (parking lot) discussion and end with more team catch-up. I call it the “mullet meeting,” meaning business in the front, party in the back. We’ve put a stronger emphasis on the issues and catch-up in the virtual working world to support strong, relevant communication and keep our team connected with each other. It’s important to keep everyone engaged in both tasks and relationships to keep a strong, unified team, even during a situation like COVID-19. By building both tasking and relating items into the standups, we are able to keep a balanced team dynamic.

 

What's one thing you've done to improve the effectiveness of your stand-up meetings? 

The greatest change has been to step back periodically and ask how the standups themselves are going. We’ve had open, honest conversations about what’s worked well and if we’re missing anything. The most impactful changes have been to open with new reported bugs (they can change the entire stand-up focus, so they’ve become a priority) and bring retrospective tasks more to the forefront, which keeps us balanced with short- and long-term work. These two changes have given us more focused, efficient standups, as they allow us to walk through our meeting items in the order that’s most likely to affect that day’s work. On a fun note, we also changed over to naming sprints after movies the team has agreed to watch within that sprint. It’s been a good way to keep folks engaged with each other and has even helped bridge some generational gaps!

 

We’ve had open, honest conversations about what’s worked well and if we’re missing anything.”

What's one strategy you've found to be critical for keeping employees engaged throughout these meetings?

The single best thing I’ve done to maintain engagement is implement active questions and focus on including all team members. It’s an expectation that each team member will have the opportunity to speak on any issues they may have. In our “parking lot” portion of the meeting, each person gets a turn to bring up issues or concerns they may have. The periodic chat about the format of the standup is important as well, as it not only gives the team a voice in the format but allows for engaged ownership as well. In any aspect of life, people will engage when they feel there is a strong purpose and sense of self-ownership. Standups are a simple but powerful way to give your teams that ownership, not only keeping the meetings meaningful, but also allowing them to set the stage for the day.

 

Each year, tens of thousands of cyberattacks occur. VMware Carbon Black wants to change that. Leveraging both behavioral analytics and the agility of the cloud, the company provides endpoint security protection for more than 6,000 companies globally.

Technical Staff Member Andy Steere told us how his team keeps sync-ups timely and efficient by following scrum methodology. 

 

What does a typical sync-up look like for your team?

We follow the scrum methodology, and we use the daily standup to sync up. Our standups are typical, but we have added an open-ended “parking lot” section to the meeting. Anyone can add parking lot items by posting to our Zoom meeting chat thread. Once everyone has given their status, the scrum master checks to see if there are any parking lot items. 

Ideally, the scrum master will prioritize the items based on the number of people involved. A member may request that an item be talked about earlier to allow them to leave for a meeting or get back to work. The scrum master leads us through each item until we are done or we run out of time. Remaining items are carried over to the next day, or a separate meeting is created to discuss them. The scrum master is quick to take an item that has moved from “status” to “problem-solving,” and they suggest it as a parking lot item. A half-hour meeting is scheduled in Outlook. The scrum master will check in with the team to see if anyone needs to leave when the meeting runs over the allotted time.

 

Prioritizing parking lot items in terms of who was interested in each topic further optimized my team’s time.”

What's one thing you've done to improve the effectiveness of your stand-up meetings? 

We took the steps shared in my earlier response because my team found that we were problem-solving during the stand-up section of our meeting, and the standups were not short. Prioritizing parking lot items in terms of who was interested in each topic further optimized my team’s time.

 

What's one strategy you've found to be critical for keeping employees engaged throughout these meetings?

We use retrospectives to improve our sync-up meetings and eliminate scrum ceremonies that could be done as a parking lot. 

 

The agricultural industry has undergone a tech transformation in recent years, and Smartwyre wants to be a part of its evolution. The company’s platform serves as a gateway for manufacturers, distributors and retailers to create or access updated product data. 

Director of Engineering Daniel Covill described how he makes his team standups feel more personal, and why he likes to see everyone’s cameras turned on. 

 

What does a typical sync-up look like for your team? 

Like many teams, we do a regular morning standup. We strongly encourage everyone to keep their camera on, which not only helps keep people focused, but also gives good body language feedback and makes the conversations feel a bit more “real.” Outside of that, we’ve become a bit more loose about the standard best practice of sticking to the script and starting immediately. We will often spend a few minutes bantering before getting down to business since there’s so much less opportunity for that kind of thing later in the day. Additionally, we take turns running each standup, sharing our screens and keeping things flowing. While a scrum master would typically handle this role, we’ve found that sharing it gives the team a sense of engagement and responsibility.

 

What's one thing you've done to improve the effectiveness of your stand-up meetings? 

We require use of a webcam. It definitely feels more personal to be able to see teammates. The other thing we’ve done is ensure everyone has adequate hardware for this specific task. With the team working from home, many choose to use different equipment than what’s provided in the office, but we make sure that all the necessary items are there and the support is provided to ensure they’re functioning properly. The idea is to remove anything we can that makes the meeting feel remote. It should be as seamless as possible.

 

The idea is to remove anything we can that makes the meeting feel remote.”

What's one strategy you've found to be critical for keeping employees engaged throughout these meetings?

Having different people coordinate meetings and keep things moving along is helpful because everyone has a different style. We’ve also adopted weekly additions to our standard meetings in which one or multiple team members present to the rest of the team for 15 to 30 minutes. Topics vary from instruction on code concepts to a rundown on an area of code that may be isolated to one or a few specific team members. These sessions tend to break things up a bit and often spark conversation and ideas that, when we were in person, may have come up in our normal interactions in the office.

 

ServiceCore wants to accelerate the commercial liquid waste management industry with its all-in-one platform. The platform helps liquid waste and roll-off rental companies easily manage schedules, routes, customers and inventory in order to save time and maximize profit.

Lead Developer and Scrum Master Andres O’Brien told us how his team keeps sync-ups succinct and informative. Hint: these huddles shouldn’t be used for status updates.

 

What does a typical sync-up look like for your team?

Our morning standups last anywhere from five to 15 minutes. The scrum master starts with any important updates, then the team takes over from there. There is no order for stand-up attendees, and each person is expected to give meaningful updates if they apply to teammates. We don’t use standups as status updates. Sometimes, it’s OK for nobody to speak (don’t mistake silence for unproductivity). To keep things moving quickly, the scrum master will monitor meeting length and overall engagement and will give hints as to when conversations should be taken offline. 

 

What's one thing you've done to improve the effectiveness of your stand-up meetings? 

Keep the meeting between developers; let it be theirs. If stakeholders want to join, they are more than welcome to, but they shouldn’t try to take control of the meeting and should be respectful of everyone’s time.

 

Stop looking for status updates and start looking for problems.”

What's one strategy you’ve found to be critical for keeping employees engaged throughout these meetings?

Stop looking for status updates and start looking for problems. If there are none, end the meeting. It also helps that our developers have a good relationship with one another and are not afraid to speak up and get help if they need it.

 

ENGAGE aims to revolutionize the way oil and gas companies interact with their service providers. Its digital field management platform collects data from the edge, such as GPS information and timestamped route and work times, thus offering companies full transparency into their field operations. 

Vice President of Engineering Sean Eby said it’s important to leave room for fun during his team’s sync-ups, and encourages teammates to share what they did during their non-working hours. 

 

What does a typical sync-up look like for your team? 

We have four types of team meetings, which keep the team connected with one another and updated on our product development. Daily standups are done asynchronously through Slack at the same time every day. Each team member contributes a brief 1-3 sentence snapshot of what they’ve accomplished since the last standup and what they’re aiming to get done in the next 24 hours, along with any questions about challenges they’re running into that someone else may be able to assist with.

Weekly engineering meetings take place on Monday mornings and focus on ongoing and upcoming items that affect our development teams, new hires, organizational changes or announcements within engineering. They also cover technical topics and challenges relevant to our group and what our plan is to change or solve them.

Bi-weekly sprint grooming/planning meetings are part of our Agile process and are meant to keep our product and engineering teams aligned regarding the specifics of our product plan. This meeting also allows the engineering team to provide their own estimates of upcoming work. In some cases, work is being done for a specific customer, and the meeting offers the chance for our team to detail our effort estimate before committing to work being done and charging the appropriate amount of money to a contract.

Monthly all-hands meetings are fun and casual. They serve as organization-wide updates led by our CEO. These meetings bring our distributed team together either in-person or through Zoom, so everyone can see our revenue, customer and organizational updates, ask questions and get caught up on other things. 

 

The written (rather than spoken) format has worked well for us as a distributed engineering team.”

What's one thing you've done to improve the effectiveness of your stand-up meetings? 

Undoubtedly, the written (rather than spoken) format has worked well for us as a distributed engineering team operating across different time zones and locations. I realize a text-based format is not the format recommended by many Agile rule-followers, but this format has worked quite well for us. In one way, since it is done through Slack, it provides a historical record of the team’s standups. This makes it easy to go back and look at what happened when, for example, a team member was stuck on a user story for so many days in a row without meaningful progress. The whole team can see this and step in, inquire, offer help or intervene if needed.

Since the standup is “public,” it can be shared or seen by others outside of the team. We sometimes receive questions about what our team does, and showing someone the daily stand-up record is a great way to show what the engineering team gets done at a granular level rather than looking at a sprint board or product backlog. 

 

What's one strategy you've found to be critical for keeping employees engaged throughout these meetings?

We prefer not to have meetings that have a singular purpose. In fact, we have pretty much cut out meetings that are not truly necessary. Even though we have trimmed our meetings as much as possible, we keep things fun by casually checking up on what folks did in their off hours. As a team, we periodically share a laugh about things that happened to us or hard lessons learned along the way.