No recurring meetings

Problem

Few team members really contribute in team ceremonies.
Most are passive or provide low value input.

Context

This problem applies to both remote and co-located teams.

Following are some examples of how the problem manifests itself:

• Standup becomes a status update. People are peer pressured to say something even if they already aligned asynchronously
• Demo has either missing key stakeholders, or they provide disrupting feedback that lead to significant rework
• User story refinement have 2 people discussing and all the rest sleeping

Solution

Delete all recurring events from the team calendar.
Schedule meetings when needed.

Standup

If team members cannot do their work without standup, the team ways of working are broken.
Improve over the 3 principles of: visualization of work, definition of done, short feedback loops.

User story refinement

Assign one representative per role (e.g. product owner, UX designer, engineer) to each user story.
Let them refine the user story asynchronously.
They will set on demand meetings when the deem pairing necessary.

Demo

Schedule a demo meeting as soon as the team has something to show to get feedback.
Invite only relevant stakeholders.
Do not accumulate work in progress for a generic demo meeting.

Retrospective

This is the only recurring meeting worth to have.
It is a safety net against human arrogance to believe we are always the best version of ourselves.

Notes

Recurring meetings are not evil per se, and they are definitely helpful in chaotic environments. However, they are a crutch.
High performing teams should have meetings adapting to their rhythm, not the other way around.