At the end of every sprint my team has a sprint review. It’s been a bit of a tradition and I think everyone agrees that we all got a lot out of it. People share best practices, things to watch out for and generally check in with each other. To have a great review meeting you need to get people to open up. How do you create a comfort zone where people can speak up? It is the sticky issues that generally slow people down, annoy them and sometimes cause people to quit their job. Here are a couple of tricks I’ve accumulated over my twelve years of management: Ask people to write things that they consider “accelerators” and “blockers” on sticky notes. Ask them to come up with at least 2 of each. It will take a little effort on everyone’s part but it’s better to have a bunch of things that are minor rather than miss one major issue. Somehow writing things on a sticky note and not adding your name to it makes people more comfortable than speaking up in front of everyone. After eve
Engineering Executive and Advisor, ex DocuSign, ex Microsoft. Passionate about putting together software teams that create award winning products.