How To Prevent Your Standups Being Dumpster Fires

Over the years my mind has been blown with the number of times I’ve heard ‘My team’s standups were regularly 30 minutes or more’!

This is criminal.

The purpose of a standup is to sync on anything that is preventing the sprint being completed as planned. Nothing else. Standup is not about proving you are busy. It is not a status meeting where you talk about everything you did yesterday, and all your meetings today.

The primary output is blockers or collaboration needed to be able to move forward. You should look at your burndown and sprint board to get good situational awareness of whether things are on-track or not, and which items are problematic. This should require only a 1–2 minute update from each person, max. If you’re talking about anything other than tickets and their states then it’s probably a good indicator you’re off-track.

Be ruthless about cutting off tangential conversation, discussions, drawn-out decision-making; those can wait until AFTER stand-up, and involved ONLY those people that need to be involved.

I’m a big fan of people actually standing-up — not sitting, slouching, or propped against a wall or window sill. Standing up is guaranteed to keep things moving at a reasonable pace.

My biggest advice is to SPEAK UP. If you are not speaking up about wasted time in stand-ups or any meetings then you are part of the problem.