Working Rhythms

I don’t know where I first came across the phrase “working with the garage door open,” but it stuck with me. The visual is powerful: people hanging out in the garage, making things, and welcoming anyone who wants to see what they’re doing. And, in the digital age, this is even more beneficial when you’re working on a team—especially so if you’re a remote team.

A team that works with the garage door open:

• Thinks out loud and discusses ideas, problems, and decisions openly.
• Shares their works in progress to get feedback and iterate.
• Writes things down to track work and maintain context.

These are the rhythms of a healthy team—a fluid, dynamic, and adaptable movement from talking about the work to tracking the work to sharing the work.

Discuss

When you’re working with the garage door open, you’re thinking out loud. This comes easy to me because I like to think out loud. Even when I’m working alone, I’ll talk to myself. There’s a different feel to ideas when you verbalize them. I’m sure you’ve had the experience where an idea sounded better in your head, but changed when you said it out loud.

That’s the alchemy of language, tone, and articulation.

Thinking about an idea, writing it down, and talking about it change the shape of the idea. They offer new perspectives. And, when done well, these benefits are amplified on a team.

The three core principles of Discuss are:

1. Think Together: Come together and collaborate on problems.
2. Surface Tension: Immediately call out blockers, challenges, and tensions.
3. Frame Work: Bring clarity to the problem space before you move into solutions.

Think Together

I’m an introvert who loves time for deep thinking. But when I’m wrestling with ambiguity, it’s helpful to think through problems together. Whenever I sense the team struggling to find a resolution to a problem, I’ll bring everyone together to talk through it. Real-time brainstorming and ideating rapidly generates divergent thinking.

For this to be effective, you need to build a culture willing to express vulnerability.

Why? When you think out loud, your thoughts often come out unfiltered. You share unfinished ideas and place trust in your teammates. All great teams are built on trust. And when you trust one another, you share vulnerability.

You think together.

Surface Tension

When the team thinks out loud, it’s natural for tension to surface—good even!

Tension is a useful force. Tension teaches. It points out where to focus. Debating is healthy in teams, but it must be in service of the idea.

Where are you blocked?

What are the biggest unknowns?

What should we be doing differently?

Give your team an easy way to ask and answer these questions. Create space to surface the tension, and work collaboratively to manage it.

I keep it simple with mechanisms to call it out in meetings, in team channels, and in the work.

In a meeting, you can just ask. Again, though, anyone speaking up is predicated on the trust the team shares. It helps if you call out issues openly and frequently. In team channels, create a format to surface issues. And keep issues updated with the latest status.

Frame Work

In order for ideas to evolve, you need a deep understanding of the problem. Not just what the problem is, but also why it’s important, and what part of the problem you should focus on. It’s in that understanding where you create context to make decisions.

Those closest to the problem should make the decision, but they need to know all the upstream information to guide the decisions.

How? Share context. Provide all the necessary information in every environment. This pairs well with thinking out loud. When a team knows the context, they build agency to make better decisions in the work.

Track

I can’t tell you how many Slack threads I’ve watched where work is discussed, a problem is identified, and nobody tracks the work. It’s not a lack of care, but a lack of discipline. You have to add the issue when it occurs, otherwise it’s lost in the noise. That’s your moment.

The three core principles of Track are:

1. Log Ideas: Create space to collect the raw ideas as inputs to improve your product.
2. Track Work: Create detailed issues that are updated and relevant.
3. Record Decisions: Document key decisions to provide context.

Log Ideas

Ideas come from everywhere: customers, stakeholders, team members. They can be external or internal. Ideas can even surface while working on another idea.

Ideas form the raw input that drive product development. Track them. Keep them in a central place, and make it easy to add them.

Track Work

Tracking ideas is about tracking what you could work on—possibilities. But when it comes to the real and immediate work, you need more clarity before the team can do the work.

Don’t let Slack threads end without tracking the work. Add the issue. Make the description clear, and assign it to someone.

Record Decisions

When a team works on a feature, they need freedom to make trade-off decisions and modify the scope to deliver on time. This is a natural part of the process, but you need to keep a log of the decisions. Write them down. Keep a Decision Log that describes what decision was made, why, and include all the necessary context. This helps prevent those moments when the team can’t recall why a particular decision was made. And it improves future decision-making by understanding the performance of past decisions.

Share

To try and surface more work, more feedback, and increased iteration speed, I started a new process for weekly demos. On Mondays, the team sets a demo commitment based on the priorities set in the Weekly Update (Issue #11). Then, at the end of the week, they share their demo live, capture feedback, and use the feedback to inform the next demo.

The three core principles of Share are:

1. Show Progress: Show the evolution of work with clear snapshots.
2. Explain Context: Talk through the context around the work.
3. Invite Feedback: Solicit feedback from the team and key stakeholders.

Show Progress

This process drives progress. Each team member has a clear goal (the demo), and then they work towards that goal in weekly increments. It’s about showing progress and sharing the evolution of the work. But it’s also about avoiding missteps along the way. You can’t wait too long to get feedback. Collect it early and often to maintain the right progress.

Explain Context

I love Loom-style videos—a video where you see someone’s face on top of the work they’re sharing. It doesn’t matter what tool you use. This is an excellent way to share context and explain the why more deeply. While the weekly demos are performed live, there are also shorter async videos shared throughout the week. Each one is loaded with context, generating a trail of contextual breadcrumbs.

Context is the fuel of decisions. The better the context, the better the decisions. And sharing the work along the way surfaces that context.

Invite Feedback

I intentionally designed the demo process for real-time, live feedback. Why? Because you create a special experience when you collaborate on feedback. Doing it asynchronously loses the collective knowledge-sharing that happens during the meeting. Again, though, this is predicated on having a high-trust team for it to be effective.

Use both synchronous and asynchronous formats to share the work and invite feedback.

Creating Rhythm

While the foundation of great teams is built on trust, the best teams build a unique working rhythm. Rhythm is formed through tempo and timing. Tempo sets the speed and timing determines when events happen. Collectively, they create your team’s working rhythm.

Tempo without timing creates chaos. You move fast, but without patterns of behavior.

• There’s no space to discuss ideas.
• Work isn’t tracked and followed up on.
• You miss the moments to capture feedback.

Timing without tempo creates stagnation. You perfect plans without generating movement.

• You spend too much time planning.
• You try to pre-plan all the tasks.
• Feedback slows progress.

Your job is the find the right tempo and timing for your team—the best working rhythm.