Hot take: daily standups are hurting more than helping

I found this stat from a study by Atlassian last month that said teams spending over 15 minutes in standups saw a 22% drop in actual coding output. I used to think daily check-ins were non-negotiable for keeping clients aligned, but now I'm wondering if we're just wasting time talking about what we did instead of doing it. Has anyone else ditched standups for async updates and seen better results?

2 comments

2 Comments

troyc1714d agoMost Upvoted

A buddy of mine at a mid size dev shop actually got rid of standups about 6 months back. They switched to a simple slack thread where everyone posts one line before lunch, like "blocked on API auth, ticket 415" or "shipping v2.3 by eod." He said productivity went up noticeably just because people stopped waiting for the 10am meeting to ask for help. The manager was freaked out at first but now admits they get way more done without the forced chitchat.

fionanguyen13d ago

Taking what @troyc17 said and running with it, that slack thread setup works way better if you keep it super tight. At one company I worked with, they did something similar and the key was making it just two sentences max, not a whole paragraph. The forced waiting for standup time was the real killer, people would hold off on asking for help or flagging blockers when they popped up at 9am. Async means stuff gets unblocked in minutes not hours, which is honestly a no-brainer once you try it.