How we work

This is an incomplete but growing list of the ways our team communicates, meets, and works.

P2s and Slack

Here’s the P2s and Slack channels that are relevant to our work:

Slack channels

Meetings & Checkins

There’s a few recurring meetings we hold.

  • P2 Team Hangout — Every Monday at 4:00 PM UTC
    A weekly meeting focused on project progress, goal updates, and team processes. We alternate between a prepared agenda format, and a retrospective format.
  • Happy Tools Hangout — As needed, Wednesdays at 4:00pm UTC
    A forum for us to dive deeper together into technical, design, and product topics in Happy Tools. Most useful when someone wants to share ideas for feedback, or we need to get aligned on a topic. We only use this meeting time as needed, usually deciding a few days before if we need it that week.
  • P2 Team Happy Hour — Optional, every other Wednesday at 5:00pm UTC
    A social time to connect with our teammates. No agenda, no topics — just hanging out and spending some time together.
  • 1:1s — Every other week
    Everyone on the team has a bi-weekly 1:1 with the team lead. This is a shared meeting with shared agenda. It’s for more than just status updates — it’s a protected time to share and ask questions of the team lead.
  • Geekbot — Daily Slack standup
    Every day Geekbot will ask you to fill out a standup questionnaire, which will be sent to #team-p2. We’re not strict about this, but it’s most useful to us and the team when our work is loosely organized (like in early project stages, or during Cool Down weeks). When you’re in the middle of a Shape Up Project Cycle, it’s not required to fill out Geekbot.

Support rotation

Our team handles customer support for Happy Tools ourselves (this fulfills our annual Support Week requirement). We rotate the responsibility a week at a time, so expect that every couple months you’ll have one week of Happy Tools support.

Project management

We recognize that projects need to be planned and managed differently depending on the needs of the team and the stage of maturity of the project. If we’re early in a major project (like the first few months of bringing a tool into Happy Tools) our organization will be much more organic with frequent group check-ins.

When we’ve hit a stage of product maturity (like Happy Schedule) we use Shape Up to plan and execute our work. At this stage it’s much easier to scope work into six-week cycles with a higher degree of confidence that we can accurately predict if a project scope can be done within our appetite.

Meetups

Prior to Covid lock-downs we try to have two team meetups every year in addition to the all-company Grand Meetup. We try to spread meetups out over the year, so with the GM usually in September our meetups will usually be in January/February and May/June.

A few months ahead of time we’ll start planning together, deciding a specific destination and dates as a group.