Estandap: highly efficient daily meetings for agile and remote teams
tl;dr Estandap is a template for daily agile meetings. It includes a daily written update (✅ accomplishments, ❌ misses, 🥅 goals for day, and 🛣goals long-term) and a daily meeting (👓 read all updates, 📝 list topics, and 🗣 discuss them).
Some agile management methodologies envision daily team meetings during which commitments can be made between members, potential challenges can be identified and discussed, as well as difficult issues resolved. One of the most popular types of these meetings has been around for several decades. It’s called a standup, because attendees typically participate while standing. The inconvenience — if not discomfort — associated with prolonged standing is intentional; it’s inclined to keep meetings focused and short.
While traditional standups may remain useful for many, truth is they were created for a pre-remote world where synchronous communication was the norm. Experience has shown they frequently result in ill-considered and improvised updates, contextual mismatches, boredom, and meetings that go way over time.
Remote work and the associated advancements in tools available for asynchronous communication now enable significantly better ways of handling team communication. I’ve been experimenting with multiple team-meeting formats for over a decade-and-a-half while running numerous companies of different sizes (Voice123, Bunny Studio, Torre, and Tribe).
Today, I’m publishing what my various teams and I believe is the most efficient format of all the ones we’ve tried over the years. It reduces input time and maximizes value by combining synchronous, asynchronous, written as well as video communication, and even emojis. We call it Estandap.
The main goal of Estandap is to enable team members in companies of various sizes to remain aligned, prioritize, empathize, help each other remove blockers, and speed up successful execution. Estandap has two parts:
- A daily asynchronous written update
- A daily synchronous (simultaneous) meeting
Each team within an organization performs both. Teams of more than 20 people tend to have middle-managers (team members who report to a leader but also have team members reporting to them). A middle-manager can thus be a member of two Estandap teams: one composed of the middle-manager’s superior as well as co-workers, and the other composed of only the middle-manager and his/her direct reports.
The daily written update
At the beginning of each work day, team members answer the following questions in a shared document (such as Notion or Google Docs) or a channel (such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or even WhatsApp):
✅ What goals did you accomplish yesterday?
❌ What goals did you miss and why?
🥅 For today, what top achievements are you planning?
🛣 What are your current main objectives and delivery estimates?
Goals should be objective and focused on results. They shouldn’t be a mere list of tasks. Avoid setting ambiguous goals such as “Start working on…” or “Work on…”. Instead, set goals that are objective and/or measurable. For example, “Push live…” or “Complete 50% of…”
Sometimes people might view written updates as a reporting tool rather than an alignment tool. If that mindset develops, those people will become less honest with their daily updates for fear of retribution. Team leaders need to emphasize that written updates are simply there to align and enlighten. They’re a safe communal space with a common purpose:
- To make us all more efficient as members of a team;
- To increase speed because of shared project and operational knowledge;
- To act as a prioritization tool for team members and project leaders;
- To create cohesion and learning because we all develop a better understanding of one another’s work;
- To help you structure your own work and share what you’re working on. Be concise and don’t overshare. Ask yourself: “What would be valuable for my team to know?” Then answer that question.
The daily meeting
Every work day, there’s a meeting. To maximize productivity (by avoiding context switching), the meeting should be scheduled as early as sensibly possible. If doing it remotely, Zoom and Tribe are good tools to use. The preferred agenda is:
👓 Read everyone else’s written updates.
📝 List and prioritize topics that need to be discussed and who should be involved.
🗣 Discuss the topics.
By default, the meeting is scheduled and moderated by the team leader. Moderation can be rotated among attendees. It adds excitement and allows the team leader to invest more time thinking about strategy.
The meeting starts with reading, not writing. Team members who join standups without having provided their written updates beforehand, slow down meetings enormously. Written updates should always precede the actual meeting. Meetings are far more engaging without waiting. Waiting sucks!
As team members read each update, they can add comments for the attention of the author. If there’s a topic worth discussing right away, they can add it to the discussion list — including the names of those who should participate in the conversation.
Once the reading is done and the topics listed, the moderator prioritizes them. Prioritization can be determined by impact, importance, or number of team members involved. Those who aren’t required to address certain topics can be dismissed to avoid the wastage of their time.
Ideally, topics should require interaction: questions and answers. Those that are purely informative (FYIs), are better handled asynchronously.
If it becomes evident that a given topic might require more time and attention than the standup should accommodate, a separate meeting must be scheduled to address it.
Daily meetings must be kept as short as possible. Reading updates should take no more than a minute per team member. Inevitably, discussions take more time, but not everyone needs to be involved. A small team of three can invest as little as three minutes reading written updates, while a team of 20 can take 20 minutes.
For example, I currently have ~20 team members directly reporting to me. I schedule one full hour: ~15 minutes to read the written updates, ~5 minutes to review metrics, and ~40 minutes for participation in any topic that requires my input.
Advanced tips for the written updates
- To promote increased alignment, include the “why” and/or the metric it is expected to impact for each goal.
- Written updates can become repetitive — especially the answers related to main objectives. To identify what’s changing from day to day more easily, visually highlight new and/or recurrent elements in the answers with colors, icons, etc.
- For large organizations, use hashtags to identify the updates from different teams.
- Ideally, project leaders answering the question What are your current main objectives and delivery estimates? should answer on behalf of their team and avoid focusing too much on their own direct execution.
- Have recently-onboarded team members read the written updates of their new colleagues dating back a month or more. The exercise will provide great insight on an average day-to-day.
- If you use the OKR framework, split the last question into two — one for objectives and one for key results:
What are your main objectives and timeframe?
What are your key results (and ETAs) that get us closer to the objective?
Advanced tips for the daily meetings
- If yours is a data-driven team, you could add a few minutes to review and reflect on your daily key-performance indicators (KPIs).
- As you read the daily updates, react with ✅ to indicate you’ve read the update. You can also react with other emoticons to cheer or show support.
- If your team is large, focus on first reading the updates of other team members on which you may have dependencies or vice versa. Sometimes, leaders may have to start reading the updates ahead of time to get through them all.
- If meeting remotely, turn on your cameras. Face-to-face interaction is important. It is likely the only time of the day when all team members get to see one another. Only turn off your cameras while reading the updates. Turn them on to indicate you’re done reading.
- To reduce monotony and increase engagement, have the moderator share something either unique or funny during the course of the meeting.
- Finish the meeting with a rallying cry. As this study found, it may help your team perform better, improve cognitive functions, and even like each other more!
Work in progress
Estandap is far from perfect. Some issues include:
- Finding the right balance between sharing too little and oversharing. Sometimes, team members end up being too detailed about their work. It’s difficult to address this behavior given that it’s better to err on the side of over-communication when working remotely.
- Estandap focuses on inputs more than outputs and outcomes. It needs to be complemented with solid performance-based or outcome-based management frameworks.
- Estandap does a good job of helping teams with alignment, prioritization, empathy, and speed. However, it doesn’t address learning and introspection quite as well. Writing updates already consumes a good measure of cognitive capacity. It requires speed and focus on planning. Adding introspection to the process is likely an overkill. Few people will have the cognitive capability of doing so much when starting their work day. Systematic learning deserves its own, parallel framework.
- When working across multiple time zones, the synchronous portion of Estandap can lead to some team members having to get out the zone to attend the meeting.
Estandap will continue to evolve. As we learn from companies using it and new tech tools become available, Estandap will undoubtedly improve. Got ideas you’d like to contribute? Please share them in the comments below.
Related frameworks
- Experimento: A practical product management framework
- Prioridad: A practical framework for product and feature prioritization
- Indicadores: Performance indicators for online platforms (a template)
- And more…
Thanks to Carel Cronje, Daniela Avila, Diego Saez-Gil, Juan Pablo Buriticá, Justin Petsche, Renan Peixoto, Rolf Veldman, and Tomás Gutiérrez Meoz for reading and commenting on drafts of this article. Thanks Tania Zapata and María Moya for the photography and imaging of this article. Thanks to Daniela Botero, Juliana Prieto, Pamela Sánchez, Sebas Gallo, and Tomás Gutiérrez Meoz for modeling for the main image of this article.
