Run effective standup meetings, remotely

It should be customisable 

Every team has their own process to conduct standup meetings, and a good tool should be adaptable to those. I have seen too many rigid tools in the market that only work well if used in a certain way. Stay away from those! 

You should be able to easily change timings of your standup (both daily or weekly!), note making formats and manage your team members. 

A good standup meeting app should be asynchronous

This is doubly important for remote teams! You can not always run around scheduling meetings across extreme timezones. And hence the team members should be able to update their work progress at their own comfort. Having a simple chat based reminder and note making tool helps! 

It should be easy to set up

Balancing features that allow for customization with ease of use can get difficult! And that is why you choose your standup tool carefully. You don’t want to get lost in a steep learning curve post installation. Your team should also find it really easy to fill their work status updates. 

It should integrate with your existing tools

You are most probably already using tools like Jira to manage bugs, or Slack to chat within the team. The standup meeting tool you choose should easily be able to live within these tools, instead of forcing you exclusively into its own ecosystem. 

It should generate good standup meeting reports

As a team leader, or a scrum master, it is important that you have a bird’s eye view of the entire team. Who is blocked? Does anyone need help? A beautiful, simple tabular summarisation of the standup meeting really helps in this case. If the tool of your choice does not have this, the meetings can get confusing and the team will lose trust in the systems that you are trying to set up. This issue compounds if you are a fast growing team of more than 5 people.