latest / Standups are not status meetings (but yours probably is)
If you go around the room and everyone reads out what they did yesterday and what they’ll do today, congratulations, you have a status meeting. You also have a standup-shaped hole in the calendar where a standup used to live.
The reason this is bad isn’t that status meetings are inherently evil. It’s that the format is doing the wrong job. Status is a write operation — someone speaks, others mostly receive — and writes are better done in text, asynchronously, where the receivers can skim and the writer can edit. A synchronous meeting is for negotiation, because negotiation is high-bandwidth and benefits from real-time backchannel.
What a standup is actually for, in my experience, is exactly two things:
- Surfacing blockers that someone in the room can unblock right now.
- Catching divergence — two people about to do incompatible things, two people doing the same thing without knowing, someone heading off a cliff the rest of us can see.
That’s it. Neither of those needs “yesterday I worked on the ingestion service, today I’m working on the ingestion service.” They need a question: is anything stuck, weird, or about to collide? If the answer’s no, the meeting ends in four minutes and everyone is delighted.
The reason teams default to round-robin status is that it’s the format that runs itself. Nobody has to facilitate; you just go clockwise. The trade is that you optimise for the meeting being easy to run instead of being useful to attend, and you pay for it in person-hours every morning, forever.
A good standup is shorter than the kettle takes to boil. A bad standup is the part of your day you complain about to your spouse. There’s no middle ground, really.