How to Run a Standup Meeting
The standup is for coordination, not narration. The goal is to make people aware of what matters and drive them to action, with as little collective overhead as possible.
1. Be on time
Don’t be late. We have standups after standups after standups; one late meeting creates a cascade of suffering.
Calendar RSVP is mandatory. Declining is perfectly acceptable. Keeping everyone guessing about whether you’re coming is not.
If you are unavoidably late, tell your colleagues.
Time your commute accordingly. If necessary, take the call from home and come to the office afterward.
And if you’re in a lift or driving, don’t join the call. Far too much collective energy gets wasted establishing whether somebody can hear or be heard.
2. Do your homework
Preparation should take no more than five minutes.
Before the standup, write whatever you intend to discuss in the corresponding Jira ticket and tag the relevant people.
We already have Slack, Jira, GitHub, and AI notetakers. Nobody should need the standup to serve as a backup storage mechanism for information.
3. Keep the information density high
As a rule of thumb:
- Share at most three facts.
- Ask at most three questions.
- Four is acceptable.
- More than five is a red flag.
Share enough information to make people aware and enable action. Don’t share details that nobody in the meeting can do anything about.
4. Lead with the takeaway
When presenting a result, use this order:
- One-sentence takeaway
- A visual, such as a chart, if useful
- The raw data, if useful
The first sentence is what people are likely to remember and carry out of the meeting. Everything after that is evidence for people who want to dig deeper.
5. Share the work, not the board
When sharing your screen, don’t open a Jira board and navigate around it.
Keep the specific tickets you need open in separate tabs, with whatever you intend to say already written in them.
Then all you have to do is read aloud.