Cycle reviews: the status meeting you no longer need

Every team we talked to had a weekly meeting whose only purpose was to find out what had happened. It was rarely called that. It was a stand-up, a sync, a review, a check-in. It was forty-five minutes, and by the end everyone knew roughly what they could have read in three.

The problem is not the meeting. It is that the information needed for it was scattered across a board, a few pull requests, two Slack threads and someone's memory. The meeting was the reconciliation step. Remove the scatter and the meeting has nothing to do.

Cycle reviews are that removal. At the end of each cycle, Cairn assembles a page from the items that shipped, the items that slipped and the reason recorded when they slipped. It lists the releases, links the changelog, and shows capacity against what was planned. The page is written before anyone opens it.

Teams still meet. They meet to decide things, which is what meetings are for. The reviews get read on Monday morning with coffee, and the questions that come out of them are better because everyone arrives knowing the same facts.