The ins and outs of 37signals Matt 03 Oct 2006

15 comments Latest by Mark

“Start each day with a stand-up meeting” is one of the rules of Extreme Programming.

Communication among the entire team is the purpose of the stand up meeting. A stand up meeting every morning is used to communicate problems, solutions, and promote team focus. Everyone stands up in a circle to avoid long discussions.

Since we A) avoid meetings and B) don’t work from the same office, we’ve come up with a digital riff on these meetings. In the morning, when we log in to Campfire, we each do an [IN] post that reveals our plan for the day. It’s just a few lines or maybe a paragraph.

[IN]s

(Marcel likes to chime in with occasional fashion advice: “[IN] pinstripes and earth tones.”)

Then, at the end of the day, we write up an [OUT] too.

[OUT]s

It’s a lightweight method of making sure we all know what’s going on around the horn. And Campfire’s transcript and search options help make it easy to keep track even if you’ve been away from the room.

15 comments so far (Jump to latest)

Spike 03 Oct 06

Sunrise will sort all this out though, I’d imagine? :)

Lincoln 03 Oct 06

That’s quite clever to keep your team connected. our team codes\designs in a circle (just a cluster of desks in a circle), so we end up focused and can hand off ideas quickly.

jonezy 03 Oct 06

we do something similar at our company but only the in portion of it. I really like the idea of prefixing each item with the [IN]. Currently each of use just writes a long ramble on sentance about what our goals for the day are.

oh and we do it all in campfire as well.

Hasan Akyol 03 Oct 06

when is sunrise coming? …….

JoJo 03 Oct 06

[IN] Get my team to start doing this in our own campfire chats.

Gayle 03 Oct 06

So is the OUT to list what needs doing tomorrow, or what’s been done today? I’m a little confused.

DHH 03 Oct 06

Out is what you actually got done that day. We all have plans in the morning of what we WANT to get done, but what we ACTUALLY get done is often quite different. Posting IN and OUTs help highlight that discrepancy and hopefully leads to more realistic planning over time.

Hasan: No sooner by you asking in every thread ;). It’ll ship when we get it done.

Ali 03 Oct 06

[IN] Learn how to be a marketing genius like you guys.

JS 03 Oct 06

Do you make a room for each day of work?

MI 03 Oct 06

JS: Nope, we always use the same room. With Campfire’s transcripts and search it’s easy to find out what happened on a particular day if we want to. The tags help by giving us a known string of text to search for if we want to see what everyone was working on at a particular time. Really handy.

JS 03 Oct 06

Do have a good method for using Rooms?

Mo 03 Oct 06

I would subscribe to Marcel’s IN and OUT posts. :)

Mark 08 Oct 06

How is the [IN] and [OUT] highlighted?