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Comment by superxpro12 | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory that these short meetings are not the root cause, assuming a trustworthy team.

Having these standups... weekly, daily, whatever-y... it forces the PM to track deliverables. Which means you have to DEFINE the deliverables. And it sort of trickles from there.

The actual hard part is doing the PM Work. Defining deliverables, making tasks in jira (or excel :p), estimating work, and assigning reasonable due-dates.

Thats what these status meetings really do. Once you have that, and you track to it regularly, I would wager you could work asynchronously with a well disciplined team.

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Yes, and - there is also something about the visceral feeling you get when your turn comes up in standup and you didn’t update any tasks and you don’t know the status of the thing you promised for this week.

If the PM does the task list and then chases the engineers 1:1, it’s a different chimpanzee brain mechanism at play. Very easy to forget/ignore you are letting down a whole team in this mode.

(And the flip side is true too, shared victory is more motivating.)

This is exactly why I do it (as a PM). The average engineer gets way more of the important work done when they have to say what they did and when, if they're blocked, they know I'll actually help unblock them.

And when the standup itself is five minutes, people are still refreshed enough to talk about a book or tv show or show off the progress they're making building a deck or let their kid say hi.

> there is also something about the visceral feeling you get when your turn comes up in standup and you didn’t update any tasks and you don’t know the status of the thing you promised for this week.

Never really experienced this. But daily are boring when it goes past the act of sharing updates and into musings by the PM, design discussions with a few of the team while the rest idle…

If you have a formal team, you need formal recurrent meetings. A team doesn't exist without meetings.

It does force the management to manage the team, yes. But it will also remind the team they exist, and everybody that they can talk to everybody else.

That said, weekly is on the limit of how often you can make those. And you have to make sure your people are not formally in too many teams.

In my experience a good async culture is sustained by regular, high-quality check-in meetings. They serve as connecting moments that support team cohesion and camaraderie.

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