As a footnote. Let’s face it, good devs are good communicators. We do it constantly with our team members. I’m blocked, I need help, why don’t you work on, what if we did..

Daily scrum and weekly grooming and quarterly planning. That’s for product. That’s counting beans and making sure no one goes rogue and accidentally innovates.

Daily scrum is nothing more than a product status meeting. If you’re a dev and you’re waiting for that meeting everyday to tell someone you’re blocked or need something.. then there’s a communication problem.

We knew what needed to be built. Sometimes it was easy, we were doing a direct port, other times product and design would write it up in somewhat detailed documentation (can you believe no stories/tasks?!). Because they were games you’d start with the play loops and continually tweak them. Assets would come in from designers throughout the lifecycle of the project and they’d just document what they wanted to see (fonts, colors, animations, flow).

We had a product manager who would regularly play our builds and speak with the clients. If the clients were unhappy, had feedback, or found bugs, he would chat or hop on a call with the lead developer (usually me). We’d write it on a sticky note or put it in our mind palace as a Todo (or if you were a defensive programmer and planned that a certain piece of code needs to be flexible, you were fixing it while he was explaining the problem).

So, we had communication, but not in the form of formal meetings. Product set the delivery dates, we set goals/cadence as engineers around those dates, and based off of continual feedback we iterated on the design.