Our standup cost about fifteen minutes a day. Twelve people, so three hours of company time a week. That was never the real problem. The problem was that it landed at 09:00 in one time zone, which is 17:30 in another, and it split everybody else’s day in half.
What we replaced it with
Each person writes a short post before they log off: what moved, what is stuck, what they need from someone else. The bot collects them into one thread. Nobody has to be awake at the same time as anybody else.
What got better
Blockers now arrive in writing, with a link to the thing that is blocked. Before, someone would say they were stuck on the billing migration, three people would nod, and it would come up again the next morning. Now the sentence is a permanent record that somebody can pick up asynchronously.
What got worse
We lost the incidental conversation. The two minutes after standup where somebody mentions an odd bug and somebody else recognises it. We brought some of that back with a Friday call that is explicitly not a status meeting.
If you try this, do not run both for a transition period. We did, for six weeks, and people simply wrote nothing and waited for the call.
