An updated repost about a meeting format you should really try.
Originally published via Substack, Mar 04 2025.
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Today, a new stand up format to try that will make your team more strategic, increase accountability, and decrease the need for micromanagement.
OK here we go.
The Context: Progress Updates (mostly) Sucked
When I started leading teams, that meant sitting in “Progress Update” style meetings.
Too many of these meetings were a firehose of technical nitty gritty. Often, it sounded like everyone knew what they were doing. Later, I would find out that some people had spent days (or longer) doing pointless work. It always turned out they’d misunderstood what their team was trying to do in the first place, it’s just nobody could tell from the jargon-packed list of to-dos they’d read out.
Sound familiar so far? Most people I talk to have been through meetings like this, and almost nobody gets much from them. In the worst cases, they become performative, with people reading out a list of complicated-sounding tasks to show how smart and busy they are. But nobody’s paying attention – they’re all busy thinking up their list.
Wanting to avoid these meetings, I’d been offering daily Office Hours instead. I encouraged everyone on my team to join me and other senior design colleagues so we could jam on whatever they were working on, make rapid progress and share methods. This wasn’t critique or checking up on people – it was more like mentorship or coaching.
Those team members that joined Office Hours enjoyed it and their skills developed quickly.
But roughly half the team didn’t join very often, if at all. I noticed several occasions when it became clear that they’d been confused, and had really needed to come to Office Hours, but they still hadn’t joined. Eventually I realised it was because they didn’t know they were confused. Not until it was too late.
Think about this from your own perspective. When do you realise you’ve misunderstood something? You rarely realise in the moment of the misunderstanding. You only realise after you’ve taken action and then someone asks, “hang on, what are you doing?”. Even if you do catch yourself in the moment and suspect you’re confused, you hope you can figure it out by yourself. After all, you don’t want to look silly or be a bother.
That’s what was happening with my team. I needed a way to catch confusion earlier.
Another leader suggested that I might need to just dig into the details of what everyone was doing. But did I really have to start doing daily stand ups? Or did I have to start micromanaging (bad news) by trawling through Jira tickets (worse news!).
Then I realised something. If I’m managing you, I don’t need to know what you’re doing. I only need to know that you know what you’re doing.
So I set up an experiment: a new twice-weekly 15-minute stand up with a twist:
The Proposition: Try Mini-Pitch Stand Ups
Here’s the format to use:
In one minute or less, tell us:
What’s the context you and your team are dealing with right now?
What’s your proposition for what you’ll do to help your team make progress?
What signals are you looking for to tell you if your proposition is working?
And what signals are you looking for to tell you if your proposition isn’t working?
That’s it. Short, sweet, and it pulls you out of the laundry list of to-dos and into a strategic frame. For strategy fans, it’s a type of back brief†
(Have you noticed, this whole email is written as a mini-pitch? 😉)
You can use problem/solution or situation/plan instead of context/proposition. I like context because it doesn’t assume that everything’s a problem. I like proposition as it suggests that you have the freedom to come up with your own ideas for what you’re going to do next. But use whatever words work for you and your team while keeping the spirit of the mini-pitch.
Choose a cadence for the sessions that works for you: daily, twice-weekly, weekly, ... Aim for often enough that the format can become second nature. In most cases, these won’t need to happen as often as traditional stand ups because they’re so much more efficient and effective.
Signals you’ll see if it’s working
I’ll tell you five cool things happened when we started Mini-Pitch stand ups.
I and my team leads could tell instantly when someone was confused about what they were doing: their pitch either didn’t add up internally or didn’t cohere with the team’s strategy. We’d spend time with them right away to figure it out, before they’d spent days confused or working on pointless stuff. We nipped way more misunderstandings in the bud. Over time, the number of misunderstandings went down, perhaps because ...
In order to figure out their pitch, each person had to understand why they were doing what they were doing for themselves. People started to develop a sense for different shapes and contexts of work, rather than sticking to one tool or process. They developed strategic chops.
Everyone quickly got good at pitching their work so that it would make sense to others and not only to themselves. This is an obscenely valuable skill and it takes practice. Of course, some people really struggled at first. That’s why we did this ritual live, in small groups. This lowered the pressure and enabled everyone to get real-time feedback or questions from their first attempt and have another go. And everyone learned from one another.
Folks on completely different teams started to understand what their colleagues were working on. People started collaborating spontaneously, sharing resources and helping each other out. Not because they were suddenly more generous, but because they finally understood what other people were doing. Overnight, the ubiquitous complaints about “lacking visibility of other teams” went away.
Against all expectations, people started to enjoy these sessions. I’ll use a food analogy. Before the change to the meeting format, it felt like we had to sit through people droning on about their food shopping lists. Afterwards, we got to hear chefs inspiring us with the delicious meals they were preparing.
Signals you might see if it’s not working
Like any method, Mini-Pitch stand ups won’t work in every context. Here’s what I might look for to tell me that it isn’t right for me and my situation.
The Mini-Pitch isn’t working if it gets twisted into “busyness theatre” – where people use jargon to mask their confusion and deflect questions, or they slip back into listing to-dos despite your best efforts. I suspect this could happen if folks are worried about layoffs – or even about subtle reprisals, like folks rolling their eyes. If it’s not safe to be confused (like all humans are a lot of the time) then of course people will hide their confusion.
The Mini-Pitch won’t be right for you if there’s a lot of resistance to even trying the meetings out as a short term experiment (2-3 months). If people simply aren’t engaged and they refuse any kind of synchronous meeting, then no stand up format will change that.
The Mini-Pitch is not enough if lots of your team aren’t getting any better at pitching clearly, even after a few weeks of practice and coaching. I’ve seen people get really good at this in a second language, so if your team aren’t making progress, it suggests there are deeper issues to tackle before you can start Mini-Pitches.
The Mini-Pitch isn’t working for you if there’s no sign of increased collaboration after a few weeks. Especially if people are still complaining about a lack of visibility across teams. This suggests there’s a broader communication issue – perhaps you need to consider shared language or instigate a “jargon jar”‡
Pivot if you sense people are tuning out in the meetings, or people are regularly “unable to make it today”.
If I saw any of these signals, I’d adapt the Mini-Pitch experiment.
I might try it in one-to-ones where I could make things feel safer. I might try it asynchronously in writing. I might adapt the questions. I might change who’s running the sessions, or who attends. I can think of colleagues from past companies who would have made sessions like these feel very unsafe – don’t let those people join!
There you go.
A plan for a new format, provided in the shape of the format.
Finally, you might be wondering if Mini-Pitches might just open up a can of worms for you. What if a whole load of hidden mess suddenly gets surfaced and now you have to untangle it? Are you just making loads of extra work for yourself?
I can’t speak for your particular situation, but I can say that it was surprisingly low effort for me to resolve things when I tried this. It was often a 15 minute conversation to clarify strategy or constraints. Sometimes it meant setting up a conversation with someone they should’ve been speaking with anyway. Occasionally it was an hour or so of co-working. In every case, it meant I had to do way less than I did when we had to clear up misunderstandings after a load of work had been done.
So yes, you should prepare by keeping an hour or so of time clear after each Mini-Pitch session to deal with anything that arises. But I’ll bet you’ll find you don’t need to use that hour all the time.
I hope you try this out. Let me know if you do.
Do you know anyone who’s had it with progress updates? Please share this with them!
Tom x
P.S. If you’d like to hear more of the backstory, and some other interactions we tried, we talked about it in episode 11 of our podcast.
A cut out and keep prompt sheet for you to use
Notes:
This is a rewrite of an older post because I wanted to get to the point faster, and I was never quite satisfied with the framing of the questions in the original. I’ve since started loving Jabe Bloom’s terms “context and proposition”.
† A back brief (also sometimes called a brief back or backbriefing) is acommunication technique where, in their own words, a team member explains back to a leader the key points of a plan, strategy, or set of instructions they’ve been given. It’s a very effective way to check everyone understands the strategy and identify misunderstandings or issues early. It should be much more common than it is.
‡ A jargon jar is like a swear jar but for a list of buzzwords you collectively agree you’d like to avoid. I’d vote for MVP, low-hanging fruit, disrupt, and maybe even pivot ;). What would be on your list?
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