Importance and benefits of leading Scrum meetings for developers

As a developer, the phrase “Scrum process” may make your eyes roll and your brain partly switch off. At least, it did for me.

3 months ago I was given the task of running Scrum meetings for my team and, with complete honesty, I can tell you that my perspective has changed for the better. Being an engineer is not solely about development; it also requires the ability to plan and understand the bigger picture of what your team is trying to achieve. Working with Scrum has propelled my growth in these areas.

I now believe leading Scrum meetings can be tremendously helpful to developers⁠—especially junior developers and recent hires⁠—and is something that should be practiced and implemented by other teams.

As a junior engineer, I know we are mostly focused on the tasks we are given, often losing sight of the big picture. Code may be functional based on specific requirements, but we can easily miss additional improvements or if there is a better approach than the problem statement in a story. From running Scrum  meetings I have learned to think about functionality as a service and understand how my work fits into the overall roadmap. Running retrospectives has also been extremely beneficial to me as they have helped me understand the pitfalls of my team and where we were misaligned. For most junior engineers, growth is what you are looking for most and one way to grow is by taking more responsibility while showing an ability to plan; I believe this is one of the best and easiest ways to do it.

For a new hire, the first few months can be daunting. I truly believe the best way to catch up and understand your role in your team is to run meetings such as daily standup, refinement and planning. These meetings give you an overview of what everyone is doing collectively, where you fit in and what you can do to help most in the initial stages when you are still learning the code base. The experience also encourages you to engage with your team better during meetings, instead of losing your attention from simply staring at blocks of names/pictures on Zoom. Also, running these meetings gets your voice out there and motivates you to ask the questions that you want to ask, which is super important! Who doesn’t love a team player?

Being both a junior and recent hire, I feel like I have greatly benefited from leading Scrum meetings. It has aided and hastened my growth, not only as a developer but as an engineer and a team member.