Discord for Business
Discord for Business — Startup growth rump for your Scrum Team
Learn how Discord can help your Business Agility and how to set up Discord channels for your Scrum team
Can we use Discord for business?
COVID-19 Pandemic made us look for creative solutions to save our businesses. With 150 million users, almost everyone heard of Discord.
But Discord is for gamers. Can we use Discord for Business?
Yes, you can! Because gamers use Discord for entertaining, people don’t think of Discord as a tool for work. But if you do a step back and look at it, it is just a communication platform. A mighty one, too, as it holds so many users.
How can Discord help your business?
- Discord is free,
- Has many inbuilt communities easy to find. There are a lot of technical communities, and it is easy to switch between tabs.
- the Discord communities are powerful and engaging
- Discord users are more open to try new products and tolerate more the “not so perfect” early versions of your product.
- The chances are that everyone in your team knows to use Discord, so learning time is 0
- Easy to ask for technical help outside your organization because your team stays in the Discord world
The open channels in Discord for Business — a boost for Scrum team collaboration
All the conversations from the Discord server are visible to any team member. It is great for team spirit because everyone knows what the others are doing. When the teams I Agile Coach use Slack, that’s one of the main challenges — to have the teams share their questions and ask for help to everyone. That’s one thing I love on Discord for Business that helps me to create that community of working together to achieve the sprint goals, rather than having everyone minding their tasks. Teamwork brings dollars to your business.
Another big advantage of having every conversation visible for everyone is that as an Agile Coach, I can see the side conversations and know where to focus my leadership.
To make a list of the advantages Discord has for Agile teams:
- because you cannot have multiple threads keeps the conversations very linear and forces the team to keep it simple — 1 conversation at a time. It is like the user stories — you want them done one at a time, and Discord cultivates that mindset
- team collaboration and team spirit — everyone sees where the other ones need help. They can collaborate to reach the sprint objectives
- open channels build trust between team members. Since there are no hidden channels, that makes people trust more the team
- a familiar environment where teams can open. One challenge I see when working with Scrum teams that are new with Agile, they are afraid that the estimations and velocity and all the other metrics we put in place will be used against them. Being in an environment they trust, it makes it easier to improve as a team
- Discord helps your business to break down the silos because of the discord community as one big family. That’s what will make it more collaborative, and you, as a business owner to be more prosperous.
Scrum bot to make your team more efficient
With my teams, we use Orli.ai for everything that is daily scrums, task management, follow-ups and reminders, and keeping the project management tools up to date. And we can even retrospect about how our sprint went, without the need of meeting. What I love the most about such a bot is that it is fully configurable based on each of my team’s needs.
How do you set up to use Discord for Business as a Scrum team?
Categories:
- Team chats — create one channel for different teams if you have multiple. They can have team-specific discussions there. If your teams work on different products, you can have the ceremonies channels for each team.
- Feeds — connect your Discord with Git, Jira, Trello, or any other tools.
- Main — company announcements, off-topic discussions, resources, agile
- Agile Ceremonies.
Here’s what Agile Ceremonies channel to create and to use them in your Discord for Business for Scrum Team:
#daily stand-up. Every morning the team will write in this channel the answer to the stand-up questions:
- What did you work on yesterday to achieve the sprint goals?
- What will you work on today to achieve the sprint goals?
- What blocks you to achieve the sprint goals?
#sprint planning. Write here what is your sprint goal, any notes the team does on the planning — order of the user stories, some deadlines the team needs to keep, or other important information. It will be convenient to have this information in 1 place during the sprint execution. It helps the team to find the information very easy.
#PBR (product backlog refinement). How will it be to have all the information and actions about the product backlog grooming in one place? The moment I introduced this Discord channel to the teams, it was a game-changer! Everyone could find the discussions around a certain feature.
#sprint review. Every sprint, your scrum team could share the agenda of the sprint Review demo, the goal accomplishment rate, team velocity. Your Scrum Master can also share a nice sprint report that you can share it further with the product stakeholders.
#retrospective. It is the perfect place for the team to reflect on how the sprint went: what went well, what could be improved, what the team should try next sprint. What I like about having a dedicated channel for the retrospective is that the team can check back on the actions they decided to take during the retrospective. If there is no channel, all these improvements defined during the scrum team retrospective are lost.
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