Async-Communication

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.

It’s 4:47pm on a Thursday. I’m halfway through a problem that’s been bugging me since Monday, and I can feel the shape of the solution forming. My brain is doing that thing where all the pieces are slowly rotating into alignment. Ten more minutes and I’ll have it.

My calendar pings. “Urgent sync — can we jump on a call in 15?”

I know what’s going to happen. We’ll spend 30 minutes talking through something that could have been a one-page document. By the time the call ends, I’ll have lost the thread of what I was working on. I’ll spend Friday morning trying to remember where I was. And nobody, including me, will remember what we actually decided on that call by Monday.

I watched a CTO tell his fully remote team that he had an “open door policy.” He said it in a Slack channel. I sat there for a moment, staring at my screen, trying to work out where the door was.

He meant well. Of course he did. He was trying to say “I’m approachable, come to me with problems.” But what he actually created was a channel where three junior developers pinged him every time they hit a snag, two senior engineers never said a word until things were properly on fire, and he spent his entire day context-switching between half-conversations that could have been, and I’m sorry but it’s true, a Google search.