Working from home — How to run a short, focused and energetic daily team stand-up remotely

Tips & Techniques for Designers & Product Managers

As more and more and designers join distributed teams and begin to work remotely, the need for team members to stay connected, maintain transparency, and foster collaboration is both a necessity and a challenge.

The tips outlined in this article will help you to structure and facilitate a remote daily stand-up for your team. A daily Stand-up, in combination with Remote Design Reviews, and other collaborative rituals will help ensure that your team is being communicative, transparent, and collaborative while working remotely.

Daily team stand-up — What & why?

As designers and product managers, we do our best work when we are being iterative. To be iterative, we have to seek input from our customers and peers early and often throughout the product development and design process.

It is easy to get lost in an idea, lose track of time, or go too deep down a rabbit hole. That’s why collaborative rituals like daily team stand-up meetings and design reviews are a necessity — they help ensure that are talking about our ideas early and often.

Daily Stand-up meetings are short, focused and energetic. They should:

• Happen everyday at the same time
• Be attended by all team members
• Last no longer than 15 minutes
• Create a moment for peer-to-peer information sharing where everyone on the team can be brought up-to-speed on any and all information that is vital for coordination.

During the meeting, in a roundtable format, each team member should briefly describe their completed contributions (what they did yesterday), their anticipated contributions (what they will be working on today), and any obstacles that stand in the way of completing a task (blockers).