Hey! Brian Casel here.  As a reminder, you're subscribed to this here newsletter where I share my notes and conversations about products, business and life.. Not into it? You can unsubscribe.

For years, I was averse to "standup" meetings—even async ones, like ours.

I found them redundant. Why should everyone have to report on things we all know we worked on?

I realized that the standups themselves weren’t the problem. We just had the wrong approach to how we did them.

We switched to more forward-looking standups with this structure:

1. Where we ended up on last week's commitments.
   
2. (most important 👉) What I commit to working on next week, prioritized.
   
3. Questions/blockers.
   
   

This is much better because:

• It emphasizes forward momentum.
  
• A chance to collaborate on setting the upcoming week's priorities.
• We're more aware of who's working on what and when.

Our weekly updates are 100% async using ZipMessage. It works beautifully for this, especially with our team spread across oceans!

Why we love async for this:

• We post around our Fri/Mon.
• 5 minutes each.
• Space to prep, edit, & tighten your update before posting.
• Transcribed.
• Listen at 2x speed!

By the way, if you work solo, there's no reason this weekly structure wouldn't work for you too.

Nothing like self-accountability and reflection on where you're spending your focus and how you're prioritizing.

It's basically the whole ballgame.

-Brian
@casjam

Here's a look at how the new contacts management area in ZipMessage is coming along.  We're putting the finishing touches on all the UI pieces and hoping to ship it by next week!

Tyler’s back on the show to talk about teams. Remote, in-house, culture, experience, and everything in between.

Jordan talks defining their category and stepping back into the sales demo seat. Brian launched a community strategy while big product plans are underway in Q4.

My newsletter is sponsored by, ZipMessage, a product my team and I made for swapping asynchronous messages with clients and co-workers using video, voice, screen or text.  Try it out and let me know what you think!