I recently had a conversation with a design manager that started something like this:
“I want to start having my team to do daily standups.”
“Why?”
“Just so I can easily see what everyone is doing.”
This sort of scenario is pretty common and I’ve actually done this myself in the past. (Standups on their own aren’t the issue here, its any task managers ask their team to do that is strictly for the manager’s benefit only.) I now question every non core-work related task I add on to my team’s workload. Otherwise, it will quickly add up and a designer will spend more time not-designing than designing. It will also send the wrong signal: that I care more about the meta work than the core work.
Back to the original example: If you have trouble seeing what everyone is working on, I bet there’s another problem. Focus on that instead. For me, it was just not being used to working in Github after using another system for so long. I ended up finding a solution that surfaces each team member’s comments with images (designs) attached. That way, I can give design feedback without asking my team to add an additional thing to their to-do list. After all, I want them to focus on their work, not on fixing mine!
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