The status update trap, Tuckman's four stages, and technical strategy 💡
Monday Ideas — Edition #118
Before we dive into this week’s ideas, I want to give a shout-out to my friend Francesco Ciulla for publishing The Rust Workbook 👏 — congrats mate!!
If you are interested in learning Rust, you can check it out at this link and get 50% off (no affiliation).
1) 🪤 Avoid the status update trap
How many times do you catch yourself at the end of a meeting wondering, "did we really need this?"
Meetings are the easy default, and, to their credit, they have plenty of qualities: easy to setup, high-bandwidth, and they help relationships among peers.
They also have the drawbacks we all know: they are incredibly draining, ephemeral (information may get lost), and challenging in distributed teams.
In my experience, meetings are best spent in situations where there is shared creation or action. They shine when there is creative, quick back-and-forth between participants, converging into an outcome that would be cumbersome to obtain async.
Conversely, unidirectional communication, like status updates, is better served by good tooling and docs.
The trick here is that a lot of status updates don’t look like it. They look like complex, involved conversations between multiple parties — but what is actually happening is only a translation act that someone (the source of information) performs in service of other participants.
So, if you are unsure what your meeting is about, ask yourself:
How many times the meeting led to an action or an outcome that was different from what would have happened without the meeting?
If the answer is none or very few, then your meeting is probably a glorified status update.
Last month I wrote a full article about how to use tools and async processes to avoid status updates 👇
2) 🗺️ Tuckman’s four team stages
Bruce Tuckman, American psychologist and researcher, created a famous model for group development, describing the four main stages that teams typically go through as they work together:
☁️ Forming — team members are introduced and the team begins to establish its structure and roles.
⛈️ Storming — conflicts arise as individual agendas and working styles clash. Members may challenge the team's direction and each other's ideas.
🌦️ Norming — the team starts to resolve conflicts and develops a sense of cohesion. Team members begin to understand and respect each other's strengths and weaknesses, and they establish norms for how they should work together.
☀️ Performing — the team reaches its peak performance. Members are highly productive, motivated, and capable of working independently and interdependently.
When it comes to processes and ceremonies, the earlier the team is on the Tuckman’s scale, the more it benefits from a prescriptive approach: you want to invest more in coordination, get feedback more frequently, and make shorter-term plans. This simply calls for more rituals and shorter cycles.
Conversely, consolidated teams, made of people who have been working together for a long time, can remove more guardrails, make longer plans, and do more deep work.
Standups are a perfect example of a ritual that largely depends on team maturity. Early teams might opt for daily, sync standups in a meeting/call. Later they may switch to async written ones, and finally remove them altogether.
Team development is also one of the main reasons why it is tricky to look at others’ stories and apply them verbatim to your team. Even when working at a similar scale, and on a similar product, what works for others might not work for you based on their and your own maturity.
I explored Tuckman’s stages, Kent Beck’s 3X model, and more ideas, in this recent piece about (gasp) Scrum 👇
3) 🛠️ Technical strategy, in practice
In our recent podcast interview, Anna Shipman shared her practical framework for crafting a successful technical strategy:
🤏 Start small — begin with a clear understanding of the current situation (what she calls the “diagnosis”).
🍻 Involve others — work with a peer or a small group to develop the strategy collaboratively.
💬 Communicate — ensure that the strategy is communicated effectively across the org.
🔄 Get feedback — regularly evaluate and adjust the strategy based on feedback.
These steps are backed by the two principles that enable strategy to exist and create value: 1) great communication, and 2) continuous evolution:
Strategy is about communication 📣
Anna recalls that all the successful strategy stories she was part of had one thing in common: great communication. She stressed that:
Strategy needs to be communicated repeatedly across the organization to ensure alignment. There isn't such a thing like over-communicating.
Communication should be bidirectional, involving team members at all levels in the strategy development process.
This inclusive approach brings two strong benefits:
🏆 Quality — it ensures the strategy benefits from diverse perspectives, especially from the people who are the closest to ground work, and often know better than leaders.
💪 Commitment — it fosters a sense of ownership among the team. People feel more committed when they feel a co-creation responsibility towards the plan.
Strategy is about evolution 🔄
Anna highlighted that a common mistake about strategy is thinking of it as a static, fixed artifact.
She advises to start with an imperfect strategy and refine it over time through continuous feedback and review, rather than over fixating over getting everything right from the start. Just like software.
Finally, she avoids treating strategy as a one-time activity, and stresses the importance of ongoing evaluation.
You can find the full interview below:
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I wish you a great week! ☀️
Luca