No. Blockers!

I tossed and turned about which order to do last week’s and this week’s small things in. Hopefully your team struggled a little with narrowing down to one goal at standup, because there are a few things to coach on there.

One way to get to one goal is to figure out which thing matters most and say that out loud, instead of listing all the things you want to do. Forcing yourself, or asking your team, to rank all the mega-important things on their own scale, so not every item is mega-important, is a useful skill.

Another option is to look at your list and come up with one way to describe getting all or most of it done. Zooming out from the minutiae of your own work and describing it succinctly is another great skill to develop.

Ok, so now your team is listing the one most important thing they want to get done today. Many standup scripts prompt you to say more than just your goals for the day. How many times have you said in standup that you had a big goal and then immediately followed it with “no blockers,” only to not achieve what you hoped?

If you’re on a team, chances are the team exists for a reason. No project gets completed in an organization without a few different sets of hands holding the ball. I’m gonna make a bold statement: there’s no such thing as “no blockers.”

There’s always something you need from someone else, even if it isn’t blocking you yet. You might need a code review, design sign-off, an architecture review, or an answer to a question before you can keep going. Maybe you need someone to pair with you, or you need to tell the team that you’re about to start something that could use another set of eyes.

So this week, “no blockers” isn’t allowed. When you say your one goal for the day, also say what you need from someone else to make progress on it. Be specific: what do you need, who do you need it from, and when do you need it? If you don’t need anything right now, what might you need next?

Estimating work is really hard. It gets even harder when you don’t think about the things outside of your control, or when you wait until they’re already blocking you to bring them up. Saying what you need out loud gives the rest of the team a chance to help before the work gets stuck. And sometimes it helps you realize that what sounded like one goal is actually waiting on three other people.

We’re not trying to turn standup into a round of “who’s blocking me?” or make people invent dependencies they don’t have. We’re trying to make the work between people visible, so the team has a chance to move it forward together. So that no one is alone in their own work. This is how we get the team to recognize and feel like they are moving as team on everyone’s task.

When I said “no blockers” what I meant was “no. blockers!”