The End of Status Updates!
How Showing Your Work Creates Trust & Excitement and Can Finally End Status Updates...Maybe
I’ve been writing a series on the Six Cadences we use at Ramsey Solutions that help us deliver great products. For a quick recap, here they are:
Stakeholder - Keep your stakeholders in the loop of what work you plan to do and why
Decomp - Get clear with your team on what work you plan to do and why
Commitment - The team forms commitments around the work they do
Daily Stand Up - The team meets in the morning daily to set a focus for the day
In this Tidbit, I want to move the story forward and discuss how your team can celebrate the work they complete in a way that creates transparency and solves a few other woes you may be experiencing.
Have you sent that memo?
“Hey, what’s the progress on that project you’re working on?” It’s one of the most common questions in business and yet it creates the absolute worst kind of anxiety in me. My first thought is, “When did I agree to do this? Wait...Why did I agree to this?” Once I get over that initial thought, I quickly try to remember where I am in the process of solving that issue. I would routinely get this question from multiple stakeholders or customers, which compounded the issue.
What if there was a way to get in front of that conversation and, instead of being blindsided by the question, invite it?
There is and it’s glorious.
Allow me to DEMOnstrate
At Ramsey Solutions we train and coach teams to celebrate the work they do in a regularly cadenced meeting aptly name the Demo. This is a common meeting in the Agile community and has various agendas, but for our purposes it was a celebration of recently shipped work for the purpose of creating excitement and transparency around a team’s work. In all, there are three keys to holding a great Demo:
Create a consistent cadence for demo
Celebrate value delivered to customers
Leave critical feedback at the door
Let’s run through those three and get you ready to start running your own demo!
If you build it, will they come…
I’m a huge fan of the idea from the movie Field of Dreams that, “If you build it, they will come.” In the arena of building great products, you may have to compel your stakeholders to come. However, the idea is not to try and work the schedule around the stakeholders. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but if you try to schedule this around anyone outside the team it will never get scheduled. Instead, schedule it and invite your customers and stakeholders and start demonstrating your work, even if when no-one shows up - which may happen for a while. The power this will give you is, when you get that anxiety inducing question, “Hey, where are we with that project?” you can respond, “I’m so glad you asked! We will be having a demo for that on Friday. Come see and enjoy some snacks!”
Leaders are a busy lot and they will do their best to try and resist, but stand your ground. As a leader, it can be tempting to circumnavigate the Demo by inserting approval processes. I talk in depth about how approvals will slow a process but for the purposes of this conversation I want to say that we need to get better about trusting our teams to work closely with the customer and ship things in an iterative manner.
It may sound a bit like I am bashing leaders and stakeholders here, but I am not. My point is that you are changing some norms and will have to break some deep seated human instincts, which requires a lot of consistency.
🎶 Celebrate good times, COME ON! 🎶
Once you get your leaders and stakeholders to the Demo, show them your recently shipped work and celebrate both success and failure as delivering value. Allow me to unpack that.
There is a ton of power in celebrating success as well as failure. Sam Walton put it best when he said:
Celebrate your success. Find some humor in your failures.
This quote purely encapsulates the spirit of the Demo. I cannot stress enough that you and your team should get in the habit of showing both your successes and your failures. If the idea of showcasing failure terrifies you like that hideous sound of laughter that emanates from that Tickle-Me-Elmo doll with dying batteries (shivers down my spine), you are definitely not alone. The only way to overcome that is repetitions. (This will not help you with the Elmo doll. God help us all)
The other key is to focus on shipped work. If at all possible, stay away from work that is incomplete, for reasons I will explain in just a moment. For the purposes of this conversation, get good about shipping work quickly, learning from the results, and iterating on what you shipped.
Leave critical feedback at the door
The main reason we focus on celebrating shipped work as opposed to incomplete work is because it reduces the amount of feedback in a Demo. You read that right. We want less critical feedback. It’s not that we hate feedback. We love feedback. Seriously. But the truth is we love feedback from the people that actually need the solution we built and we want it at the appropriate time. I can recall a specific scenario where someone showed up to a demo and said, “Can you change that button color from orange to blue?” Yeah, that’s not helpful. The work was already shipped and the customers loved it. The only result of that suggestion was a frustrated product team.
Protect your Demo from people needlessly calling out the flaws in shipped work. Listen, the team already knows that they could have spent another day or two perfecting the look/tone/feel, but I believe the quote by Tony Robbins:
Perfection is the lowest possible standard.
Why is it the lowest possible standard? Because it’s unobtainable and we’d never ship anything. Some of you think you just heard me say teams should ship garbage. That’s not what I said nor do I mean that. If your team is committed to failing fast and iterating, you have to get comfortable with getting the riskiest assumption figured out. If the color of your button is the reason your product fails, you may have other problems.
Ship work and celebrate it. Outside of that you should invite feedback from your customers.
If you’re doing a Demo already and it’s so people can gripe about or suggest changes to your work you are probably on a one way train to having a team that would love to never demo work again.
Get good about protecting your Demo and leave the critical feedback at the door.
Recap
And that, my friends, is the Demo! If you and your team have recently shipped work you should:
Consistently celebrate shipped work, invite stakeholders
Celebrate, with snacks and root beer!
Protect the celebration from critical feedback
It’s that simple, but in practice it takes a ton of consistency and work. If you get it right, your stakeholders will probably never stop asking you for status updates, but you will at least have a good place to point them in the hopes that they will one day turn over a new leaf.
That gives me hope. Hope it gives you hope as well.
Until next time,
Keep on Learning. Keep on Growing.
The End of Status Updates!
That last piece is so important! Personally I stopped attending demos for a while for 2 huge reasons: 1. they turned into Q&A/Feedback sessions where the focus felt like it was first and foremost an opportunity for people to critique work and ask "how will this impact this other thing I'm doing" with random questions that only apply to the asker, instead of *celebrating* shipped work. 2. they became so polished, with practiced presentations, beautiful slide-decks, clearly artfully scripted and well rehearsed speeches. I knew there was no way I could ever demo something along side such high caliber of presentation. I'm a maker, a builder, not a speaker or presenter, and the thought of trying to demo something I built (actually demo, click around, scroll through the page, etc.) next to these expert level motivational speakers was just daunting. thus. Thus, I stopped attending.
Fortunately, through very intentional work, the focus shifted again towards CELEBRATING work (both wins and failures) and sharing learnings, and not a Q&A or critique session, and I'm happy to join and celebrate my teammates and their work!