This simple meeting template got me a promotion

To give a bit of context, I started to work in a small startup that was in the process of becoming a scale-up. As part of extending the team, I was hired among five other junior software developers.

TL;DR

If it is too much, just jump ahead to “the solution” :)

Context

I changed my career to software development after a decade of working in different product positions, from roles as a “product owner” to roles as a manager of the entire product development department.

So although, at this point, I was still a “junior developer”, I brought years of experience improving on internal processes in the company I worked for.

A startup evolving into a scale-up usually needs to improve coding processes and practices, but also its internal communication, management style, documentation and, project management processes (among many other things).

This means that even if you are a “junior developer” or in any other junior role in the company, you can make a lot of difference and bring a lot of value by improving the processes you take part in.

We will dive deeper into one example, a standup meeting template that changed the daily team communication across the entire company.

The Problem

After a couple of months working on different teams, I noticed that morning standup meetings tend to be long (can be half an hour for a team of 5 members) and has a lot of irrelevant information.

Moreover, we had multi-disciplinary teams which means that each team consisted of members from different parts of the company — a product owner, frontend and backend developers, a designer, and others. Too often members would speak in a technical lingo that other don’t understand, dive too deep into their goals or start a conversation with one other members on a specific issue.

The last issue was that each member’s update was done verbally and it was hard to follow if they finished what they set out to do.

The Solution

I decided I am going to approach it differently. At first, I did not give any direct feedback or critique.

I created a template for myself:

• Done (update on all of yesterday’s tasks)
• To do (today’s tasks in a numbered list to show priority)
• Blocked (issues which you cannot go further with, and why)
• Meetings
• Further ahead (the upcoming tasks, will help the product owner / team lead change priorities of today’s tasks if needed)

The fact I took 5–10 minutes each day completing this template before the meeting and pasted it in the team’s group at the start of the meeting. Making up the time to prepare for the meeting helped me to speak shortly and to the point, when everybody else were rambling.

That wasn’t all, I made sure to avoid technical lingo as much as possible and wrote my tasks in a way that broadly show under which project are they. Something like:

Feature[new login page]: use a form library to create the new form

I would finish with a link to the task on Jira, an app where we add the proper scrum board and tasks. This way everyone could go into the link and see more deeply what the issue was.

The Result

Very quickly I got compliments from the tech lead and product owner and within a week other members of the team copied my template and started using it as well and a new memo went to make sure to avoid a technical lingo as much as possible.

The daily standup meetings that used to take up to an hour took less than 10 minutes now and communication, clarity, and understanding rose significantly.

I was asked to take part in more strategic meetings regarding the improvement of similar processes across the company and was immediately able to renegotiate my position and salary.

During my two years at the company, I took those kinds of initiatives many times, but those will be topics for more articles.

And as always, please feel to leave a comment and let me know what you think. I appreciate any feedback.