Why Daily Standup Meetings Don’t Work for Designers (or anyone?)

Disclaimer: These are simply personal opinions based on first hand experiences in my career so far. Daily stand-ups must work for some teams, and I would love to learn more about that process.

Agile Methodology has plagued technology companies for a while now. It involves a few important ceremonies to appease the overlords (customers, leadership yada yada). Sprints, scrums and a bunch of other made up stuff.

One of these holy ceremonies is the Daily Standup. It is one of the most infuriating and rarely useful meeting of the day, any day. The original intent of a daily standup was to meet everyday for 15-min (ideally even shorter), identify issues and resolve them before they can have any major impact. But these meetings have devolved into a tool for micromanagement and unproductiveness when they take time away from the actual work.

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The Problems with Daily Standup Meetings

Management Issues

In most teams, daily stand-ups are a start-of-the-day meetings. Some teams that operate on a higher difficulty setting have the same meeting end-of-the-day (EOD) as well. They are structured to get answers to three questions – What did I work on yesterday? What am I working on today? What issues are blocking me?

An inexperienced, uninterested manager armed with these questions turns a nonchalant 15-min meeting into an interrogation. People have to justify how they spend their day and how much time they spend of each task. As a result, a well-intended meeting creates a toxic and suffocating environment for everyone.

Additionally, the team may be setup for failure from the beginning if it only makes progress (or what management sees as progress) through a daily standup meeting. This could be due to a recent restructuring, new or over-extended managers among other factors.

Lack of Trust

Trust is essential in a professional setting. It often originates from a mutual respect between the team and the manager. A manager who doesn't feel this way would prefer to dictate the team’s day-to-day activities down to their last minute (micromanagement). This is unsustainable for both in the long term. And when the team notices their manager’s unavailability, disinterest or apathy, they see no point in reaching out proactively.

In both scenarios, the only time everyone comes together is in the daily standup due a professional courtesy.

Distraction and Waste of Time

Daily standup meetings often become a side-quest to manage the manager’s expectation rather than the project. Worse is when a standup meeting intended for 15-min turns into an impromptu 45-min review and brainstorming session. For an added loss of productivity, some individuals have to be a part of many standup/status update meetings depending on their ongoing projects.

The impact of a 15-min is much more than a tiny 15-min slot on the calendar. There’s a pre-meeting anxiety, post-meeting anxiety, context switching. Overall, there’s a larger implication and time wastage than most people realise.

Some managers prefer to dictate their team's day-to-day workload to feel a sense of control. For the team however, this causes a complete lack of clarity. It also renders any sort of planning pointless when things can change at any moment. It's also a great way to destroy the team's functioning, morale, collaboration instead of building it up.

It’s hard to come up with a bigger waste of money, time, or attention than status meetings.

– Jason Fried, Co-Founder, Basecamp

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Well Then, What Are The Alternatives?

Centralised Documentation and Async Updates

For most of us, the daily standup meeting is complemented by a centralised documentation of the tasks. It could be a JIRA, Confluence, Trello, Linear. Or any one of the thousands of task management tools out in the wild.

A lot of the information shared in the standup meeting, maybe even all of it, can be gathered from such a documentation. In addition or simply as an alternative, each member in the team can provide an update over Slack/Teams.

Words on paper paint a better picture than words in the ether. Here’s Jason Fried from Basecamp elaborating this point…

We write up status reports rather than say them out loud. We post them to Basecamp so they have a permanent home where everyone can see them whenever they’re ready. People can then post follow up questions in-context right below the write-up so the entire conversation stays together, forever. It’s as simple as that.

Create Processes and Build Trust

Apart from a handful of critical projects, a weekly team check-in is more than enough to keep everything on track. Teams can also agree to document most of what they work on so managers can get better context and progress updates on the less critical projects.

More importantly, managers should strive to empower their teams to own their projects, collaborate effectively within and outside of the direct team, and ask for help and feedback when needed.

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Final Thoughts

From my experience, and possible a narrow world-view, I believe daily standup are not very useful for self-managing people (or anyone in general). It’s better to create an environment to setup people for success. And create structures and processes in place, and empower people to manage themselves.

I can understand having standup meetings as a start-of-day ritual for casual conversations. But it should not become the only way to get work done.

The greatest people are self-managed — they don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it — they don’t need to be managed at all!

What they need is a common vision — and that’s what leadership is. What leadership is, is having a vision, being able to articulate that, so that people around you can understand it — and getting a consensus on a common vision.

– Steve Jobs, Apple