Improve Your Daily Standup with a Question of the Day (QotD)
Our engineering teams spend half of our in-person time every day not talking about engineering. What’s up with that?
Census engineering teams have pretty much converged on the same daily standup process:
Teammates post asynchronous progress updates in a Slack thread
Teams meet live for 30 minutes to do “Question of the Day” and chat about blockers
I’m here to talk about the Census engineering tradition that is “Question of the Day”, and why we spend so much time every day doing it.
What is it?
Question of the Day started about a year ago. Our engineering team was growing quickly and expanding across 4 timezones (s/o to Alex in Halifax!). What started as a quick getting-to-know-you activity on one of our engineering teams soon proved to be popular on a more regular basis.
And thus, the QotD tradition was born!
How does it work?
Anyone on the team can propose a question for the day, and then every teammate gives an answer. We usually popcorn around the Zoom room (i.e. when you take your turn, you randomly pick the next person to go), which helps alleviate the pressure of “Omg when am I going to volunteer my answer, should I go now or wait…awkward silence…”
Our favorite questions are generally the ones that result in sharing stories or hot takes passions. For instance, “What’s your favorite scent?” is a low stakes way to learn about memories or places that bring each other joy. Today we learned that our PM Will used to work in Budapest early in his career, since his fav scent is still Maison Margiela Jazz Club. Similarly, we spent 10 minutes going through our manager Ian’s Facebook page of hand drawn comics after he responded “comic book artist” to “What would you be doing if you weren’t in this career?”. And who could forget the time front-end wizard, Speed, theatrically stormed out of the room quit the Zoom meeting after learning I hadn’t seen Die Hard (”Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?”). For added fun to really get to know your coworkers, try a Show and Tell question, like “Show us your Youtube feed”.
You may be asking, how on earth do we still come up with a new question every single day? Don’t you run out eventually? Honestly no! There are so many things to learn about each other, plus there’s no shame in asking repeat questions (because who remembers everyone’s answers?? Our answers change as we evolve as humans, and new teammates always guarantee new content!).
Getting to know your teammates on a more personal level rocks (my coworker Oliver dives into that more in this blog post about managing remote teams). It helps to build trust, improve morale, increase productivity, foster empathy, and enhance communication. As we’ve experienced in the last few years, working on increasingly remote teams can make getting to know your teammates harder. At Census, QotD is just one of the ways we try to build the connections that make our lives better. Trust me, asking for help or hopping on a call to debug an issue with someone is way more fun when you know about each other’s most embarrassing haircuts.
P.S. We’re hiring! Join the team, and let us know what your worst haircut was :)
To inspire this where you work, here’s a list of our favorite Questions of the Day (so far):
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
What’s your favorite scent?
What would your job be if you were born in the medieval times?
What book do you recommend everyone read?
Where would you take us if we all visited your hometown?
Show us your Youtube feed
Show and tell us something nearby
What totally different career would you want to have?
What are you looking forward to this week?
What was the highlight of your weekend?
Favorite cereal?
Are you a good dancer?
If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life what would it be?
Which band/artist – dead or alive would play at your funeral (or other celebration)?
What was the last movie you watched that made you cry?
If you could see one movie again for the first time, what would it be and why?
What current fact about your life would most impress your five-year-old self?
What's one of the most delicious things you've eaten recently?
You have to sing karaoke. What song do you pick?
What's something that a teammate did this week that you admire or are proud of?
What’s a food you hate that most people love?
What's the weirdest food combination you enjoy?
Share your biggest home cooking success and/or failure!
Go to food spot growing up
Current or aspirational tattoos?
What’s your favorite weather?
What movie scarred you as a child?
First CD/tape you ever bought?
What was your first job ever?
Where do you want to travel?
What’s your favorite piece of furniture you’ve ever owned?
What’s expensive but totally worth it to you?
What’s something you are very proud of?
What's the longest you've gone without sleep (and why)?
Do you collect anything?
What’s your worst bug-related story?
How often do you experience deja vu?
What’s your most unusual item of clothing?
