Dear Budi: What cadences do you run in your team?
Dear Budi: What cadences do you run in your team?
Four cadences that essential for my team: Sync up, Discovery playback, Co-design, and talk to users
Hi friend 👋
In today’s Dear Budi column, we have a question from one of our lovely readers about the team’s cadences.
Q: Dear Budi, one of my responsibility is to lead the team and ensure we stay aligned. I feel it’s important to ensure the team is motivated yet stays on track with their initiative. I constantly revisit my team’s cadences, so I’m actually curious about what cadences you run in your team. Can you share a little bit of each cadence’s purpose as well? Thank you, really appreciate your newsletter.
I really like this question because cadence might seem insignificant, but is actually an essential part of your team. Let me share my perspective on this.
Budi
Friday: Sync up
Let me start with the Friday Sync Up. It’s a moment where cross-functional members gather to close up the week and get ready for the next week.
I usually will use the first 10 minutes to open up the meeting with a quick recap of our strategy—usually, I remind everyone about the target audience, the problem we’re trying to solve, and the users’ feedback about our product.
Basically, I’m trying to ensure everyone understands our goal and our plan to achieve that.
Then, we’ll go through each initiative one by one on Asana. For each project, the DRI will share the progress, the blockers, and the next steps.
We’ll close this with a high note and ensure everyone is ready and know what’s their focus next week.
Monday: Co-design
Then, on Monday, we’ll have a co-design session. This is a session for the design and product team. We’ll invite other functions as needed.
The intent of this session is to either sharpen our problem space or to use it to do some design critique. If we started a new initiative, we could use this one-hour session to really write down the pain point and the job to be done from the user's perspective. This will help everyone align.
Sometimes, we can use this time to really explore wild ideas that might have never been discussed before. I really aim for this session to be a moment where we problem solves, but also be creative.
Mon-Wed: Talk to the users
From Monday to Wednesday, my team typically always runs user interviews. We typically have a set of questions from the prior week, then we talk to the users to uncover a few insights.
I love this part because it really helps my team understand the user and the problem space. I’ll talk more specifically about this part if you’re interested, let me know in the comment, or simply reply to this email.
Then, we usually have time to really synthesize and debrief all of the interviews. As we talk to the users, we slowly build a persona to easily differentiate them.
Discovery playback
To embed the learning spirit in the team. We have discovery playback where we invited all cross-functional members to share the learning from the research or experiment that we run before.
Typically, I will have a document prepared beforehand with a list of questions we wanted to answer that week. For example, “Does [solution x] actually useful?” or “What’s the biggest pain point for the community leader?” We will answer these questions and really share all of the synthesis and learnings.
I will have one document dedicated to recording all of the important learnings in bullet points. One of the bullet points can go like this: 50% of our community can’t make a webinar.
I love discovery playback because it’s the time my team really learns and reflects on the questions and assumptions we have.
Closing note
Of course, there are more cadences that we hold from time to time, like design critique or design scoping. However, these are 4 cadences that I feel are the most essential for my team. I hope by sharing this, you and your team can start discussing what cadence is essential for your team.
I’d love to know what’s your favorite cadence in your team. Please drop any in the comment section to share with other readers in this newsletter :)
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