Covalentteam

A rhythm your team can count on

Covalentteam installs on your GitHub organisation and keeps the rhythm for you. It plans your meetings with each colleague, and opens every one on what has happened since the last.

The questions it is for

  • Who have I not spoken to?

    Their last meeting, and the next one the rhythm has planned.

  • What has changed for them since?

    A month of pull requests, reviews and issues, read as one picture.

  • What has gone quiet?

    Work that stopped moving, raised before it becomes a surprise.

  • What do we talk about?

    The work since your last meeting, laid out in the meeting itself.

A meeting, start to finish

The rhythm plans it, the meeting opens on what to talk about, and what was said stays where it was written.

  • Planned before you think of it

    Each colleague’s rhythm lays their next meetings on one calendar for the whole team. Drag one to another day to move it alone, or the series after it.

  • Opens on what to talk about

    A meeting begins on the work since the last one, the pull requests and reviews it is about, so neither of you arrives having to remember.

  • Written the way it reads

    The note is written as it will be read back, under a title of its own. Finishing the meeting files both, with the work it took up.

  • A page for every colleague

    Where they stand, what you can do about it, the meetings already held and the work behind them, a tab each.

  • In the calendar you already use

    Subscribe once and every meeting follows you there, planned and held, under its title. What was written in it never goes with it.

Writing about leading a team

Notes from the people making Covalentteam, on the work the product is about.

Read the readings

Four things it asks for, once

Setup is a single sitting. After it, the month reads itself and the product comes to you.

  1. Bring your team in from GitHub

    Everyone GitHub lists in your organisation stands here, on the team or not. Adding somebody puts them in the rail beside you and starts their month reading from that day, against the work GitHub reports under their handle.

  2. Define what matters most

    Put the four disciplines in the order this team is run by.

  3. Choose what to hear about

    What GitHub is allowed to raise, and how long it waits before raising silence. Every one of these is still yours to argue with once it lands — switching one off means it never arrives at all, which is worth doing for the ones your team has no use for.

  4. Say how often you meet

    How often you meet somebody is a rhythm, and the rhythm does the planning: their next meetings go on the calendar from the day one is due. Nothing is sent to anybody, and the month stays the window whatever is chosen — so the team can see who is overdue without anybody keeping a list of their own.

What we will not do to your team

The colleague being read never signed up for this and cannot see it. That is why none of these four is a setting.

  • Nobody is given a number

    A month comes back as one of four words, and the word is yours to disagree with. Never a position on a scale.

  • A month, then it is gone

    Activity ages out after a month. There is no year of somebody’s worst fortnight waiting to be produced at a review.

  • The room stays the room

    What is written in a meeting never leaves, not even for your own calendar, which is given its title and whom it was with. The only thing you can share is how long you have kept a rhythm.

  • A plan, not an invitation

    The rhythm lays meetings on your calendar and on nobody else’s. Nothing is sent to a colleague, and nobody has to keep a list about anybody.

  • A letter about the work Now and then, on what we are building and what it has taught us.