Standups Are Dead

I originally read this back in February of 2023, but never wrote up my thoughts until now.

This article fundamentally changed the dynamics of one of my teams. In the full remote world of 2023 we were struggling to build any sort of team cohesion outside of incidents, midway through integrating an acquisition, the forced socialization events of the early pandemic were non-starters. I initially read it, thought to myself that it would be a great fit for my team Phoenix (the name is a whole other story), but they would never go for it as a bunch of curmudgeons. Regardless, I shared it around with a few of the developers, all of whom immediately latched on to it and demanded we try it. I soft started our conversion with expanding our 15 minute standup to 30 minutes and really leaning into starting the meeting with small talk. We switched standup reporting to a slackbot, prompted people 15 minutes before, and focused hard on discussions and problem solving in the live call. It became a running thing to see how long into the session we could get before someone brought up work (initially often only a few minutes), at which point everything turns serious and we start to walk through a problem. As we got more comfortable with each other, we ended up having to assign the duty of party-pooper to the on-call engineer, where at 15 minutes left they would forcibly air any blockers in the status updates, ensuring we entered the day unblocked. Over a couple of months, the team went from a group of people that had met in person once and mostly just worked on the same stuff, to a group that understood each other, even if they didn’t agree on some things, but would definitely show up for each other, every time.