On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Thanks for the detailed reply, Nik!

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Nikolas Everett <neverett@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> 1. Full-team checkin (weekly, 25-50 minutes)
>
> This seems like the showcase meetings.

I see them as quite different. My vision of the showcase (which could
be quite different from anyone/everyone else's) would be that it would
consist of presentations, and would focus on demonstrations (or
documents), not discussion (although obviously things would be
discussed). Two or three people or teams might each take 15 minutes
showing something off, and most attendees would be "audience", not
"presenters".

The team checkin would be a mix of water-cooler talk and team issues
like "Who is going to the hackathon?" or "Hey, we'll be releasing X
next week".

That is not to argue that we necessarily need both. Just that I see
them as relatively non-overlapping.

Yeah that is what I expected as well. Showcase is for demo as described and Full team is for state of search from multiple teams.

> I think the only reason to keep this around is to make sure we feel like a
> team. Its nice to hear everyone's voice but why not rely on the others for
> this?

If we want the entire vertical to feel like "one team" (which is what
I heard from several people), then I think some kind of "team" meeting
weekly is pretty valuable. If the whole team is meeting weekly for
other reasons, that could fulfill that purpose.

Yes.

>> 2. "Sprint" planning (weekly, 25-50 minutes)
>>
>
> This one is fine. It should start as 50 minutes I think and we should try to
> shrink it if possible.

Makes sense to me. And we have already proven that we are capable of
ending meetings early, rather than always dragging them out to their
full allotted time.

>> 3. Daily standup (almost-daily, 5-15 minutes)
>>
> Daily is probably going to be hard for some teams unless we have some
> asynchronous process. France and SF just don't overlap enough to do
> something synchronous daily.

I'm fine with each subteam figuring out what will work for them.
You're right that some 2-person teams probably don't need anything,
and some of the other teams might work well with 2x per week. Email is
also an option for daily contact, when synchronous is not an option.

Personally, as a developer, I found value in having regular checkins,
because it helped me stay on track. Was I not meeting my commitments
because I was getting dragged into other projects? Too many meetings?
Distracted by shiny objects? Surprised by unexpected issues? Or, in
cases where I was working efficiently toward my commitments, it was
nice to take a scheduled moment and consciously say: "Yup, everything
is on target."

>> 4. Showcase (biweekly?, 25-50 minutes)
>
> Tomasz's proposal to do them monthly made more sense to me.

Sounds fine. The main reason I mentioned biweekly is that in a pure
scrum environment, they do these at the end of every sprint, which is
often 2 weeks. But especially given the nature of the work this team
is doing right now, monthly makes sense.

>> 5. Retrospective (biweekly?, 25-50 minutes)
>
> Same comment as #4. Can we just line up the showcase and the retrospective
> on the same day one after the other?

Monthly feels a bit infrequent to me, but I'm open to trying it.

An alternative to the back-to-back would be to have a meeting every
two weeks, and alternate between a showcase and a retrospective. Just
a thought.

Well if the idea is they are both sprint related -- I like stacking them after the sprint as suggested by Nik and keeping them to the lighter side time wise but blocking the 50 for both. No demos... straight to retro where we comment on the lack of demo-able things :). If you want to demo you need to let Kevin know by the day before so he can cancel or give appropriate time estimates? Finish early we get a reward of more time to ourselves.

>> 6. Technical deep-dives (purely as needed)
>>
> +1. We haven't needed this for a while.

Cool.

>> 7. Product backlog grooming (TBD)
>
> Its not clear to me how this is different than the "sprint" planning
> meeting. I expect we're just going to be pulling stuff form the top of some
> list into the sprint when we need it.

The sprint planning is about pulling work from the product backlog
into the sprint backlog. This grooming activity (which would not
necessarily be in the form of a meeting) is all about the product
backlog, triaging new issues, making sure task titles are clear,
setting roadmap-level priorities, and figuring out what tasks are
likely to be candidates at the next sprint planning meeting.

>> 8. Front-end/back-end coordination (TBD)
>
> Ad hoc like the technical deep dives?

Maybe. I suspect this one will change over time, as our UX team is built up.

>> 9. Other
>>
>> Of course, there would also be various strategy-level and operational
>> meetings between various combinations of Wes, Moiz, Dan, and Oliver. I'm
>> especially unclear on what (if any) research/data-related standing
>> cross-sub-team meetings we should have. And this doesn't count all the
>> recurring one-on-ones, which are also valuable.
>
> The showcase is a good time for that.

You are proposing having a combined Showcase+Cross-sub-team issues
meeting? Interesting, but I a wary of combining those two unrelated
topics. Perhaps this goes back to our differing interpretations of the
showcase.

If we have not covered it in the other meetings I would be surprised. I think external showcases for other orgs or company brown bags maybe the exception and we'd do those as we get close to having something viable for release to generate excitement or elicit feedback before release. Dan would typically be the instigator with support from various teams per feature.

> In fact the round the room style of updates we do is literally what the standup should be, only it takes us 20 minutes instead of 15.

Well, plus our current twice-weeklies give a voice to UX, Data, PM,
VP, etc, whereas a standup would typically be developers only. But
yes, they are currently quite similar in structure.

More thoughts (from anyone/everyone)?

Kevin

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