How Maximize Productivity With Scrum Meetings
By Jody Bell
We all know how meetings have a tendency of dragging on.
You’re sitting there, on a Zoom call, and you begin to hear it. Someone loses track of the point they are trying to communicate, the “uh’s” and “like’s” begin to start, excessive details are now being shared, and you realize you should get comfortable because they are officially rambling.
Trust me, there is nothing wrong with this! In fact, in school we are often taught that more is better in terms of sharing your thoughts, however, there’s a fine line between being thorough and hindering productivity. In the business world your bosses, mentors, and investors don’t want to hear your brain dump for 10 minutes straight; instead, you need to learn how to cut away the more irrelevant information and work towards being concise.
This can be particularly hard when working in start-ups because being a good entrepreneur tends to consume you. The nitty-gritty details that you are fascinated by because you are passionate about your venture just aren’t relevant to everyone, yet your love for this initiative makes you believe that the smallest of details are of the utmost importance.
As your project grows you will find yourself working with mentors, joining our Girls With Impact Boardroom to track your progress, or even bringing in additional founders who are passionate about your initiative. In these situations, you truly want to ensure you can discuss your progress in a concise and professional manner - which can be done with scrum meetings and sprints – two executive function tools often used by startups.
Scrum Meetings: The Key to Productive Meetings
The term “scrum” comes from a rugby formation, and implies teamwork as scrum meetings are a designated time where teams come together to discuss their progress on a project.
Generally, these meetings have a strict agenda, and each individual briefly covers what they have done, what they are working on, what issues they’ve identified, and their next steps. This agenda forces you to avoid rambling on about details, and helps build a foundation for strengthening your elevator pitch and becoming more concise. Additionally, this structure requires you to really break down the specific tasks you are working on within a larger goal – which is a great organizational activity helps and helps identify the “small wins” that are checkpoints towards long-term activities.
For these reasons, going through the motions of a scrum meeting even if you are a sole founder in a venture, is a great idea and can be done with a mentor or other stakeholders.
Sprints: A Way to Segment Progress Within Your Venture
In your scrum meetings, you are breaking down your specific activities to achieve overarching goals for your start-up. These overarching goals are called sprints!
A sprint is like a race that the team runs together. The team sets a goal for what they want to accomplish during the sprint, like creating a new feature for the video game or improving the design of the website. Then, the team works together every day for a set amount of time, usually 1-4 weeks, to reach that goal.
During the sprint, the team has daily meetings (scrums) where they check in with each other to make sure everyone is making progress and that they're working on the most important things first. They also have a special meeting at the end of the sprint to show off what they've accomplished and to plan for the next sprint.
Even if you aren’t working within a team, segmenting your goals for the next few months/weeks into sprints can help you work efficiently with mentors or investors, or even just help you stay accountable with yourself!
Let’s check in - how exactly do scrums and sprints fit together to help build a functioning company?
Understanding the specific jargon and how scrums and sprints fit together can be a bit confusing.
So here’s an example. Imagine your start-up focusing on producing organic produce to impoverished communities. A few major long-term tasks that will get you there include:
Sprint 1: do market research and speaking with communities and farmers
Sprint 2: create marketing materials and do investor/press outreach
Sprint 3: develop an app and website to increase customer buy-in
Each of these goals are sprints – they probably take at least a month to complete and can be broken down into specific tasks. So let’s break down just the first sprint – engaging in marketing research and speaking with communities and farmers. To accomplish this you likely need to do the following:
Identify local farmers/communities you could speak to
Write and send an email to send to farmers/communities asking to chat with them
Draft a list of questions to ask farmers/communities to gauge their interest in your venture and speak to them
Compile all this information into an easy to read document you could share with mentors, investors, or the press
For this specific sprint, these are the specific tasks you are working on within a week-to-week basis to complete this sprint. Within your scrum meetings while you are working on this specific sprint, these are the activities you are reporting on – pointing out which you have completed, what you are currently working on, and highlighting any roadblocks you are facing.
This seems like a ton of work. Is it really worth it?
Simple answer…yes.
Sprints help you organize the overwhelming amount of work needed to build a start-up into more manageable long-term goals. Scrum meetings break that down even further into short-term goals that keep you on-track and motivated through the encouragement of small-wins. Plus, practicing scrum meetings forces you to be more concise when speaking about your venture, and teaches you the fundamentals of start-up culture and collaboration!
Plus - as difficult as it may be to pick up all these new words into your vocabulary, using them as a young professional is pretty neat (and I promise it will impress!)
If you have any questions about scrum meetings or have anything you would like to hear about please reach out to me at jody.bell@girlswithimpact.com!
Jody Bell, 21 is Girls With Impact’s Editor in Chief and a program graduate from Greenwich High School. Girls With Impact is the nation’s only online, business and leadership program for girls 14-24, turning them into tomorrow’s leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators.