Overview

Daily Stand-ups

Daily stand-ups can be a mix of live meetings (either virtual or in-person) and async check-ins. At Shortcut, we do both live and async check-ins. 

For the in-person or live stand-ups you can create a Space to share with your team to check in on the status of work. You can even use the pre-made Space in your team-scoped Stories Page which is automatically filtered on your team and current Iteration. 

To be more focused on metrics or viewing work across workflows, you can use the Iteration detail page to run in person check-ins. One thing you can do to make this page even more helpful and tied to the larger work by adding the link to the related Epic or Epics in the description. This allows you to quickly hover to see progress.

From the Stories section of the Iteration page, it’s great to Group by Owner, then you can walk through what each person is working on.

For the async check-ins, we use an automated reminder in Slack (this system works with any chat tool), which prompts: What did you work on yesterday? What are you planning to work on today? Any blockers? This ensures you can stay on top of where the team may need support and be able to track progress. Keep in mind linking to Shortcut Stories here make it easy to stay updated and the unfurl feature helps see details at a glance. One tip here is for the Engineering manager to get in the habit of responding to everything. No one likes feeling like they are wasting their time writing something no one is reading. React and reply to ensure the team knows how valuable these check-ins are.

Another key question that ties into monitoring progress is asking Are you blocked on anything? Making sure to ask this question outright ensures your team is supported and you keep Iterations and Epics progressing.