Dozen of Rules for Running an Awesome Daily Huddle Meeting

People say that the ability to run a daily huddle is not a great talent. Actually, it seems quite simple, like another meeting.  

However, any experienced product manager will tell you that the daily huddle has enough power to be considered as one of the important product management “levers”.

What is a daily huddle?

If you have never heard about this kind of meeting then take it easy. A daily huddle is as the same as a standup meeting or a daily scrum aimed to keep team members updated and prepared for their next action, clear priorities for the day and armed with the tools they need to get it done.

What makes a powerful daily huddle?

People and their efforts do. Here you may check out 10 tips (perhaps trivial but somehow effective and proven) for running a great daily huddle meeting.

Clear goals

The key goal that all team members should set during the daily huddle meeting is to improve communication flow through faster and transparent feedback.

24/7 feedback model will increase project velocity and enable the team to make quick adjustments to keep the project running smoothly. Right goals and objectives are the secrets for the effective daily huddle. And do not even start planning your meeting without clear and understandable goals! This is the direct road to failure.

Topics for discussion

What should be discussed during your daily huddle? The relevant topics should include the play to run and who will be running it. The crucial point here is to timely define what task is on the critical path and who will do it. You should also identify if there is anything blocking the work.

Remember that the daily huddle is not a status meeting or a meeting for in-depth technical discussions. This kind of meeting is about the next product activity that needs to be undertaken.

The cadence of the meeting

As we know, the key timing recommendation for conducting the daily standup or daily huddle is 15 minutes, not more. It’s better to arrange it every 24 hours.

There are teams that arrange such meetings three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). However, it can influence project velocity as teams miss out on fast feedback.

Time and space

It may seem easy, but reserving a meeting room, finding a time for discussion, relocating and setting a computer or a wall projector take some time.

In the ideal world, you’ll have a regularly scheduled meeting time and a dedicated room for this action.

Personal speech

What should you actually say? It always depends on what your team needs. Do not forget that the purpose of the team huddle is to check-in with your team members. Be short and crisp. The ideas of what to share during the huddle may be as following:

• What was accomplished yesterday?
• Top priorities for the current.
• Personal project wins.
• Reviewing the core metrics.
• Sharing roadblocks that you need assistance in.
• Recognizing others’ accomplishments.
• Customers updates.

Reprioritization

It’s not a secret that often team members feel overwhelmed with work from competing projects. One more obvious benefit from any daily meeting is about ensuring priorities and shifting current work.

Individuals may be working on the wrong thing and critical tasks may get unnecessarily delayed. Clear prioritization is the way to optimize it. Ensure team members’ priorities are correct and check if they are not overloaded with the simple methods and product management tools or dive deeply into the popular complex methodologies for working with priorities.

Some of our recent posts may be helpful:

• Lean Prioritization Approach for Product Manager’s Duties
• Product Feature Prioritization as One of the Key Product Manager’s Must-Have Skills

The sense of urgency

It’s important to practice a sense of urgency so participants do not get off track. That’s why a daily huddle should be about 15 minutes or less.

The meeting should be on point, effective, and not boring. All team members should feel energized.

Daily huddles and weekly planning

Your daily huddle meeting will perform better if combine it with weekly planning. Weekly planning is when you take a slightly longer distance view to be better prepared for threats.

The art of visualization

Many of us are used to wall and boards with colorful pens for visualization tasks, plans, and other agenda stuff.

Is it a discovery for you that special Kanban-based project management tools are better and more comfortable? Yes, that is the truth.

Often teams that use simple physical boards do not have a complete picture of how their tasks fit into the overall plan and the strategy. They can not identify details in the context of the schedule.

In this case, such friendly platforms as Hygger.io look pretty helpful. The tools provide team members with convenient Kanban boards, a smart product roadmap, the backlog priority chart and many more useful features.

No distances, only face-to-face meetings!

It’s not always possible, but try to meet face-to-face.

There are dozens of researches demonstrating that people communicate more when they are physically close. These kinds of meetings also create a better sense of community.

These huddle meeting tips should give a clear picture of the current state of your product and result in complete optimism. At the very end of each meeting, your team members should be totally inspired and sincerely state: Ok, team. Let’s go make it happen!