Talk to other team members more
trading efficiency against richer collaboration 2026-06-02 #product
People on software development teams should talk to each other more. We’ve all spent so much effort on improving process efficiency, and working asynchronously, that we sometimes overachieve and avoid one meeting too many.
Meetings
Scrum’s reaction to waterfall software development introduced so many questionable meetings that it called them ceremonies, possibly ironically. These meetings replaced traditional up-front documentation with something more conversational. Now that we’ve moved on from 100-page functional requirements specifications, we no longer need those meetings to keep them at bay.
Healthy long-term Scrum projects typically reduce the ceremony, in favour of more asynchronous work. However, while agile teams should celebrate cancelling recurring meetings, you should probably keep the last one: the retrospective. If you cancel that, your team process will fossilise, and you’ll no longer have a venue to discuss tricky topics.
Specifications
Despite the decades since the last time I opened a functional requirements document in a word-processor, developers still frequently crave specifications. After all, specifications resolve real-world messiness, before you embrace the uncompromising precision of code. Also, ideally, someone else writes them.
However, from a product management perspective, specification demand sometimes feels like a wish to avoid talking about the problem that a particular piece of work will solve. Ultimately, writing specifications and getting exactly what you ask for resembles the trope of the overly-literal genie, who gives you what you ask for instead of what you need.
The specification game gets old fast, and creates an adversarial relationship with programmers that trains them to develop passive-aggressive traits. Fortunately, focusing on the user experience instead often works.
Chatbots
Annoyingly, people don’t always respond when you want to talk to them, decline your meeting invitations, and even go on holiday. This availability gap increases the chatbot appeal. However, at the time of writing, chatbot responses – however plausible – lack a crucial ingredient. Chatbots don’t do gossip.
When you chat with an LLM, it doesn’t mention what it already told your colleagues. Effective collaboration needs a more advanced kind of intelligence that understands the kind of psychological safety that balances the tension between collaboration and privacy in a team.
Talking things over
When you have too few meetings, you end up with misunderstandings to address. To minimise meetings, reserve them for two kinds of important work:
- difficult conversations, in regular facilitated retrospectives
- casual conversation, such as a time to start the week and catch up on everything except work.
When you have too many specifications, but also too much waste and rework, shift left on that work too, and inject some casual conversation earlier on in the process. Formalise this as a product trio (or three amigos) if you must, especially if it helps make it a habit. Alternatively, if you work in the same location, get a noisy coffee machine that brings people together.
When your LLM tells you things, but its model doesn’t account for your team’s tacit knowledge, conversations and gossip, find a way to reconnect to the proverbial grapevine. If you think about it, you already know which team member talks to everyone and knows everything.
Above all, beware of too much process efficiency and skipping conversations. Instead of saving time, maybe you need a better signal.
