The title is clickbait. I’ll admit that upfront. I’m not going to tell you to fire your standup. I’m going to tell you something more nuanced and therefore less shareable: your standup should change shape as your team grows up, and if it looks the same at month twelve as it did at month one, something has gone wrong.
I do daily standups with new teams. Every single day. And with my established, well-communicating teams, I’ve backed off to Tuesday and Thursday. Both of these are the right call. The trick is knowing when to shift from one to the other.
The standup isn’t the point. The communication is the point. The standup is just one way to get there.
Why daily standups exist (and why they work at first)
When you’re building a new team, especially remotely, daily standups do something that nothing else quite replicates. They create a rhythm. They force people who don’t know each other yet to show up, speak, and listen. They build the muscle memory of communication before the team has figured out how to communicate naturally.
With a new team, I need to hear how people talk about their work. Are they precise or vague? Do they flag blockers early or sit on them? Do they ask for help or struggle in silence? The daily standup gives me a compressed window into all of this. It’s not about the status update, it’s about the signal underneath the status update.
The person who says “yeah, it’s going fine” every day for a week is probably stuck and not saying so. The person who gives a detailed breakdown of everything they did is probably anxious about being perceived as productive. The person who says “I need ten minutes with someone who knows the auth module” is the person who’s going to be fine, because they already know how to ask for help.
You can’t see any of this in a Jira board.
The 3/3/1 format
I ask every team member to prepare three things before the call. Not during the call, before it. This is important, because it forces a moment of reflection rather than improvisation.
Three bullets on what you did since the last standup. Not a novel. Not a ticket-by-ticket walkthrough. Three bullets. If you can’t summarise your work in three bullets, you either did too many things or you’re not sure what you actually accomplished, and both of those are worth knowing.
Three bullets on what you’ll do before the next standup. This is the forward-looking bit. It creates a lightweight commitment that makes the next standup accountable. Not in a surveillance way, in a “did the plan survive contact with reality?” way.
One bullet on what’s blocking you. Just one. If you have more than one blocker, the most important one goes here and the rest go to Slack. The single-blocker format forces prioritisation: what is the ONE thing that, if removed, would make the biggest difference?
The whole thing takes ten minutes with a team of five or six. If it’s taking longer, someone is storytelling instead of summarising, and that’s a facilitation problem, not a format problem.
The quiet observer
Here’s the part that might sound a bit uncomfortable, but I think it’s important to be honest about.
I ask to be included as a +1 in engineering chat channels. I don’t usually reply. I just observe how the team communicates when I’m not directly involved. How do they make decisions? Do they discuss trade-offs or just go with the first suggestion? Do they help each other? Is the tone constructive?
It might seem creepy, but the team knows I’m there. It’s not surveillance, it’s situational awareness. They can use private channels for personal chat. But the engineering decision-making channels, I want to see how those conversations flow, because that’s how I gauge whether the team is ready to drop from daily to twice-weekly standups.
If I can see in the chat that decisions are being made well, that blockers are being raised without waiting for the standup, that people are helping each other without being asked, then the daily standup is becoming redundant. The team has built the communication patterns that the standup was there to create. The scaffolding can come down.
When to back off
There’s no formula for this. It’s a gut feeling, informed by observation. But here are the signals I look for:
Blockers appear in Slack before the standup. If people are flagging problems in real time rather than saving them for the morning call, the standup isn’t serving its primary function anymore. The communication is happening organically.
The standup gets boring. This sounds flippant but it’s genuinely a good signal. If everyone’s updates are predictable, if there are no surprises, if you find yourself zoning out, it means the team is well-coordinated and you’re all on the same page already. The standup is confirming what you already know.
New team members get onboarded by the team, not by you. When a new person joins and the existing team naturally pulls them in, explains context, shares knowledge, that’s a mature team. They don’t need the standup to coordinate. They’re already coordinating.
People start apologising for “not having much to say.” This is the clearest signal. If half the team is regularly saying “nothing to report, no blockers,” you’re wasting their time. Thank them for being honest and cut the frequency.
Tuesday and Thursday
When I drop to twice-weekly, I pick Tuesday and Thursday. Monday is too early, people are still getting their heads together. Wednesday is mid-week and feels arbitrary. Friday is too late for anything to be actionable before the weekend.
Tuesday catches the start-of-week plan and any Monday surprises. Thursday checks progress and surfaces anything that might need attention before the weekend. The gap between them is long enough that there’s actually something to report, and short enough that problems don’t fester.
The format stays the same. 3/3/1. Prepared in advance. Ten minutes. The only thing that changes is the frequency.
The async-first connection
This ties into something I’ve written about before: calls kill deep work. Every synchronous meeting, no matter how short, creates a context-switch. It breaks the morning. It fragments the focus window. A 10-minute standup doesn’t cost 10 minutes, it costs the 20 minutes of ramp-up time on either side.
The goal is always to move toward async communication as the primary mode, with synchronous calls as the exception rather than the default. The daily standup is the training wheels. You need them when you’re learning, and you should take them off when you can ride.
A well-thought-out document will always beat an emergency call. A clear Slack message with context will always beat “can we jump on a quick call?” The teams that communicate best are the ones that write things down, think before they type, and save synchronous time for the things that genuinely need it.
The pushback
I’ve had people outside engineering, board members, product managers, occasionally marketing, suggest that backing off from daily standups means I don’t know what my team is doing. That I’m “losing visibility.”
I push back on this hard. I have MORE visibility with a mature team on twice-weekly standups than I do with a new team on daily ones. Because the mature team is communicating in channels I can read, making decisions I can observe, and raising problems in real time rather than storing them up for a performative morning call.
The daily standup can actually REDUCE visibility, because it creates the illusion that the 10-minute window is where communication happens. It isn’t. Communication happens all day, in Slack, in PR reviews, in documents. The standup is just the visible tip. If you’re only looking at the tip, you’re missing everything underneath.
The bit that matters
Here’s what I actually believe: the standup is a tool, not a ritual. Tools should be used when they’re needed and put down when they’re not. A new team needs the daily rhythm to build trust and communication habits. An established team needs the space to communicate in whatever way works best for them.
If your standup feels useful, keep it. If your standup feels like theatre, change it. And if half your team is sitting there with nothing to say, have the courage to let them get back to work.
The best managers I know are the ones who build systems that make their own interventions unnecessary. The standup is one of those systems. Do it well at the start, observe carefully, and when the team outgrows it, let it evolve.
That’s not firing your standup. That’s promoting it.