Everybody get up

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I asked you to think about the origins of a regular meeting you’ve been having. Hopefully you didn’t just think about it, you wrote your thoughts down.

Let’s talk about Standup. The format varies from team to team, but the idea is familiar: get together regularly, share your todos for the day and mention when you need help. Over time, though, a short, frequent meeting can decay in quality much quicker than others, turning into a routine people go through without really listening.

The First Small Thing

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every team has a way of doing things. How meetings run, how decisions get made, what happens when work gets stuck. When you join a team, you learn those things so you can get on with the work. After a while, they can stop feeling like choices anyone made. They’re just how work works.

The trouble is that the way a team works can keep going long after the circumstances that shaped it have changed. People come and go. Customers change. Products and codebases grow. Teams move offices, go remote, and then return again. A process that made sense at a time can stop making sense. If the org doesn’t have the muscle to contend with those pains, then they are addressed long after they start hurting.

One Small Thing on Cullen MacDonald

Everybody get up

The First Small Thing