Overview

Some of our team communication is handled through recurring live meetings (ceremonies). To ensure that we treat this valuable time together with scarcity in-mind, we will maintain the purpose and other details for each meeting and its cadence.

Meeting time is essential, but scarce. Use it only where it provides clear value to all attendees.

Meetings or Ceremonies

Meetings work best when they have familiar structure, so here are some common meeting formats, often called ceremonies.

Standup (10 or 15 min)

Standups are brief and structured, as in “don’t bother sitting down” brief.

  • Scope of Attendance - Single product, project, or functional team… all the way to department-wide or the entire company

  • Recurrence - Daily or specific days of the week

  • Purpose - Orienting the team for a new set of activities or bringing the team together for a predictable close to a set of activities

  • Scheduling - Start or end of a work day. When this is not possible, due to teams distributed across time zones, it’s recommended to schedule according to member(s) with the latest start time.

Check-in (20 or 30 min)

Check-ins are unstructured - topics are raised and discussed until there’s none left or time runs out. For a functional team, these are often called staff or team meetings.

  • Scope of Attendance - Single product, project, or functional team

  • Recurrence - Daily or specific days of the week

  • Purpose - Sharing information, raising issues or risks, getting agreement on decisions

  • Scheduling - Most convenient to maximize team attendance

Extended Standup (30 or 45 min)

Combines a Standup followed by an (optional) Check-in. Allows extended discussion time for Standup items or longer topics. Attendance for the Check-in portion is optional to respect time of attendees

  • Scope of Attendance - Single product, project, of functional team… all the way to department-wide

  • Recurrence - Daily or specific days of the week

  • Purpose - Orienting the team for a new set of activities or bringing the team together for a predictable close to a set of activities AND sharing information, raising issues or risks, getting agreement on decisions

  • Scheduling - Most convenient to maximize team attendance

Retrospective (60 min)

  • Scope of Attendance - Single product, project, or functional team… all the way to department-wide

  • Recurrence - Bi-weekly or monthly

  • Purpose - Reflection and kind assessment, gathering feedback, ideating incremental changes, committing to specific actions due prior to next retrospective

  • Scheduling - Toward the end of the week to provide the best context for a broader “look back”. Avoid the beginning of the week when focus is on tactical planning and execution.

All-Hands (60 min)

  • Scope of Attendance - Department-wide up to entire company

  • Recurrence - Monthly or quarterly

  • Purpose - Sharing information, interacting with leaders through question & answer dialog, soliciting feedback

  • Scheduling - Provide plenty of lead-time for this larger audience to reschedule existing commitments

Roivant IT+REF Schedule
Cadence Daily (or multi-Day) Weekly Bi-weekly Monthly Quarterly
Roivant IT+REF Standup - MWF Retrospective All-Hands Roivant All-Hands