One of our leadership principles at Mbrella is that we distribute ownership. We apply this in daily life by being self-disciplined and doing self-reporting. It keeps middle managers away from our company and avoids communication overhead.

The in-n-out: 5 weekly questions

• Every Monday morning, our geekbot in Slack asks everyone 5 questions.

  1. What are your ⭐ HIGHLIGHTS
     • Highlight important contributions, celebrations or remarkable events for the period
     • Should be straight to the point
  2. What are your 🔥 FIRES
     • Mention unexpected events that slowed down the work, or continued points of attention that need to be raised
     • Fires should trigger reach-out to make sure the person is heard
  3. What are your 🎯 LAST WEEK OBJECTIVES (LWO)
     • List your objectives
     • Always start with an emoji: ✅ done, 🔄 in progress, and ⭕ not done
     • If in progress, give a progress indicator (ie. 80%)
     • Write it pronominally, in the past tense (e.g. Created a new feature)
  4. What are your 🌀 Other Progress (Not planned)
     • List your objectives
     • Progress made that were not in your TWO last week
  5. What are your ▶️ This Week Objectives (TWO)
     • State your personal objectives for the period
     • If there is a priority you really want to insist on, this is the right place to do so
     • Group your objectives per OKR so we see how your objective contributes to our team OKRs

• All answers are shared with everyone in our Slack channel #in-n-out. Everyone can see in a blink who’s working on what.

• A good example of an in-n-out

  

Guidelines

• Reply to these questions before end-of-day
• Comment on someone’s in-n-out if you have suggestions or questions, spotted a work overlap, don’t see an important priority in the objectives,...

<aside> 💡 How to write your In-N-Out if you’re a tech guy? We have noticed that our Tech Team members can have a hard time to fill-out their In-N-Out. Indeed, they already have a detailed reporting of their tasks and stories on JIRA, and their In-N-Out is often a summary of JIRA. The result is often something quite technical and indigestible for a mere mortal. Moreover, working task by task in the backlog, it’s not always super clear for a Tech to know on what tasks they will work on during the week.

So here are a few tips&tricks to fill out your In-N-Out:

• Don’t copy/paste JIRA! No need to put tickets numbers or tickets titles, it will not mean a lot for your colleagues
• Write your answers as if you were talking to a non-tech colleague. Avoid technical language, the goal is really that any person in the company knows high-level what you are working on and what are your struggles.
• Don’t feel forced to fill-in each section. If you type “No” or “-” or “none”, Geekbot will remove the question from the output.

Here are a few tips below for each question:

• ⭐️ Highlight: if a non-tech colleague asked you at coffee break: “What did you work on last week?”, what would you answer? What would you want her to know?
• 🔥 Fire: if a non-tech colleague asked you: “Did you have any problem or fire you had to extinguish last week”?, what would you answer? Think about that urgent bug that you worked on late to please the customer support team ;) You can also mention any big burden you have on your shoulders, e.g. “Release of feature X is coming soon and we still have a lot of work to do to make it happen”, “Our infra is causing stability issues and I haven’t identified it yet”,…
• 🎯 Last week objectives: → If middle of a sprint: “No” → If end of a sprint: Take the sprint goals that your had identified (see below in ▶️) and indicate if they are done or not (✅ , 🔄 , ⭕)
• 🌀 Other Progress: Less relevant for tech team without going into too much details, so you can just answer “No”
• ▶️ This Week Objectives: → If middle of a sprint: “No” → If beginning of a sprint: indicates on which part of the sprint goals you will work (e.g. “Release feature X”, “Stabilize product”, “Prepare back-end for X”,…).

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