Lesson 11

Card 0.6: Running a Standup

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Unit: 0, Engineering Process Format: Short instruction + do the job twice Time: 15 minutes of instruction, then two real standups Prerequisites: None. Take this one early.

Core Question

Every engineering organization on earth runs some version of this meeting, and almost all of them run it badly. A meeting that should take five minutes takes twenty-five, everyone leaves annoyed, and nothing was coordinated. What makes the difference between the five-minute version and the twenty-five-minute version, and can you be the person who produces the five-minute version?

Resource (about 10 minutes)

A standup answers three questions per person, one sentence each: what moved, what I am doing today, what is blocking me.

Your job as facilitator is four things and none of them involve having answers.

Call the order. Same order every time, or go around the circle. Do not ask “who wants to go next,” because that costs three seconds of silence per person and it lets the quiet people disappear.

Hold the sentence limit. When somebody starts explaining, cut in. “Give me the one sentence version.” This feels rude the first time and it is not rude, it is the job. Everybody’s time is on the line.

Park the blockers. This is the whole skill. Somebody names a problem, and the room’s instinct is to solve it. Yours is to say who can help with that, talk at 3:30, and go to the next person. The problem still gets solved. It gets solved by two people at a bench instead of seven people standing around.

Carry one sentence to studio sync. After team standups, each facilitator gives the room a single sentence: what your team is doing this session and what you are blocked on. Not a summary of the standup. One sentence.

What you are not doing: answering questions, assigning work, evaluating anybody, or reporting to Mr. B.

Two failure modes to watch for in yourself:

The facilitator who talks the most. You are running the meeting, not being interviewed at it. Give your own update like everyone else and then get out of the way.
The facilitator who lets it slide because cutting a friend off is uncomfortable. Five minutes times twelve sprints is an hour of your life. Cut them off.

Activity: Do the Job

Facilitate your team’s standup twice, on two different sessions. Not back to back if you can avoid it, because the second one should benefit from the first.

Both times, keep a note afterward, three lines in your notebook:

How long did it run?
How many blockers came up, and did you park them or did the room start solving?
One thing you would do differently.

Clearing This Card

Two things.

Mr. B watched at least one of them. He floats between corners, so tell him which session you are facilitating so he is in your corner that day.

A 90-second oral check. The questions come from your own two standups, not from this page. Expect something like:

Your second standup, somebody named a blocker. What was it and what did you actually say?
Who talked the longest, and what did you do about it?
One of your teammates gave a useless update, something like “worked on the claw.” What is the follow-up question that makes it useful?

You cannot pass this by having read the card. You pass it by having run the meeting.

Why This Matters for Competition

Two reasons, one obvious and one less so.

The obvious one: the engineering presentation is twenty minutes with a hard cutoff and four judges who have seen a lot of teams ramble. Somebody has to run that rehearsal and hold people to time. That person will have practiced.

The less obvious one: judges ask about project management, and they ask because it is a real predictor of whether a team ships. “We ran standups” is a weak answer. “We ran two-level standups with a rotating facilitator, and here is the rule we used to keep blockers out of the meeting” is a company that knows why it does what it does. Judges want the why.