Make a Change

After two weeks of trying to take a look at how and why your team is working the way it is, I’m gonna throw out the first change I want you to make. I’m guessing that while you were listening and noticing the things your team was saying in standup, you thought, gee-whiz, they sure are listing a lot of things each day. They probably also didn’t give themselves a clear way to notice whether they’d made progress on the most important things.

This week, I want you to ask everyone to name just one thing they think is most important to move forward each day. That’s right, give your engineers permission to have a single goal for the day—not a promise that they’ll finish it no matter what comes up, but a reminder to you and to them that engineers should not be evaluated on how busy they are. When people feel like they need to prove they’re quite busy by saying a long list of todos at standup, it gets harder to focus on the right stuff and to build slack into the system to work on things with each other.

So tell everyone that you know how busy they are and you believe them, but you’d rather they make one thing true by the end of the day, even with all the other stuff they definitely need to get done. Standup is when they say out loud what thing they think is most important for them to move forward, and where they might need help.

You can and probably should do this in one-on-ones, too. Ask what they’ll make true, not just what task they’ll do. “TICKET-1424 in progress” isn’t a goal; “Get the frontend making a basic successful call to the backend” gives you a sense of what they’re trying to accomplish. Say the outcome you’re aiming for, not just the status of the task.

A single goal is often tough for managers and ICs alike to stomach, but I’ve seen so many more folks struggle with setting a clear outcome/measurable goal for in progress stuff. The nudge you can give is to ask what the smallest next step in the work is. Maybe its writing some tests, maybe you need to get sign off from a Product Manager about a late discovered edge case. No matter how small that step might seem, it’s a great place to start, and a heck of a lot better than 20 unrelated and hand wavy “more progress” todos.

Don’t stop writing down what people say, either. With your team setting small single outcomes each day, you’ll start to see momentum in the consistency of saying what matters most and then achieving it.