Heuristics to Ensure Your Team is on The Same Page | Hacker News Reader

Heuristics to Ensure Your Team is on The Same Page

pulseasync.com

47 pointsanacleto8 comments

"Use tools that give you the ability to see who’s seen or hasn’t seen messages."

This makes me cringe a bit. People are tired of getting tracked. I'd much rather be asked in a survey if I was reading your newsletters and what I thought of them.

Oof. Agreed. Not a fan of that part.

I would argue it's impossible at a large organization to be aware of all of what's going on around you.

I can't tell you how many times a manager sidled up to me and said "What do you think about X?" when they had forwarded me a several months long conversation as an e-mail, and expected me to spend hours unraveling it while simultaneously hitting my dev targets.

That is to say, it's super easy for a managers to broadcast information, and super expensive for the team to consume it. It becomes a thing where you can't even tell what information is going to be relevant.

Article is underwhelming.

I think of "on the same page" as everyone has clarity on the important parts of a plan.

> Whoever sets the meeting controls the agenda, but it's whoever takes the meeting notes who controls the outcome.

From experience, this is naive.

> Seamlessly, if you want to prevent people from having divergent perspectives on things, you should provide the same amount of data to everyone.

You don't get there by over-sharing and under-sharing. It's inefficient.

I try to keep my overall plan in one single page in a Word Doc. We break our epics and stories out in Jira but we have a same page that everyone on my team looks at when it comes to doing our large scale planning. It's great.

Yep. Having a 1-pager (and keeping it fresh) adds so much efficiency and focus.

"Write things down" is probably the most important, in a world where people think Agile means no documentation. Our team has lots of conversations during grooming and never writes the notes down that we talk about which is very frustrating because it's so easy and has a huge effect on the outcome.

One that I'd add is invite everyone to the same meetings or put them on the same e-mails, don't have one-off meetings and conversations with certain people because it leads to half the team being in the dark.

That’s Crazy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com