The "3 standup questions" are terrible and need to die

I think context is really important. The design of the stand up was meant to be a light touch checkin at regular intervals just to make sure we&#x27;re staying aligned and people aren&#x27;t getting stuck on stuff. So criticisms like<p>&gt;Focuses on activity, not outcomes<p>Isn&#x27;t really valid, because the standup isn&#x27;t where you discuss outcomes, that&#x27;s a separate thing that alredy happened, we&#x27;ve already decided the activities you&#x27;re doing and how they align to outcomes. We don&#x27;t need to rehash that daily.<p>&gt;Doesn’t reveal any information about when that work will be completed<p>Again, there&#x27;s a separate process for that.<p>I think it&#x27;s a fair point that if you&#x27;re doing standups, and you&#x27;re not doing them as part of a broader agile framework then yes - maybe you do need to think about what role the standup fills and therefore what questions to ask. But if you&#x27;re actually trying to follow something like Scrum then those questions are not stand up questions, there&#x27;s a separate process for that.

I think that the author is making a mountain out of a molehill. But even aside from that, they don&#x27;t really give an argument for the thesis. Things like &quot;Focuses on activity, not outcomes&quot; are not evidence for something being harmful. It&#x27;s just arguing against buzzwords with buzzwords.

The primary point of standup is to make sure the team gets face-time together every day to talk about their shared workload. Humans are social creatures and getting everyone together for a few minutes is a pretty high ROI activity.

The standup questions are awkward motivation killers. The people that look good in those meetings are usually just pandering. I&#x27;m convinced standups have stuck around because they make managers feel like they&#x27;re adding value. If people are waiting until the next workday to be unblocked your team is moving too slowly.<p>On the flip side having the team chat regularly is a value add. Maybe you can talk about upcoming product things, ideas people have, the market in general, and any other thoughts people have top of mind. But forcing everyone to talk about what they&#x27;re working on is counter productive. Everyone on the team knows if they want to know. If there isn&#x27;t team visibility to what everyone is working on then something else is broken.

<i>Any blockers?</i> If blockers have been resolved immediately then the short answer to the question will be <i>no</i>. Otherwise it will be <i>yes</i>.<p>Sounds like a decent question to me.

A better title (supported somewhat by the article) is &quot;standup needs to die&quot;. If you have a task list and keep it updated, you don&#x27;t need to meet daily.<p>If you do meet daily, though, these 3 questions are still useful.

These three questions are intended to keep standups short. I haven&#x27;t, personally, been on a team that sticks to this format. It always ends up with individuals talking about their individual implementation thoughts on whatever they are working on. During this time, others zone out, missing anything that could be important. Nobody learns anything, and nobody is able to fully concentrate on their tasks.<p>I purposefully schedule meetings after our standup to make sure I cut it off after 30 minutes. Our team of 11 will go for almost an hour if nobody cuts people off.

I&#x27;m surprised to not see not more agreement on here so far. I personally find the three questions rote, boring, and coming up with content that feels satisfactory is a chore. I agree with trying to think critically about the goals of the practice and whether the default standard practice is best serving those goals.<p>But that&#x27;s just me, and if a team collectively likes the time and the ritual, then they should keep it.

Daily stand-ups are terrible and need to die.

The comparison to a soccer team is very odd. Further, Brian seems to completely misunderstand the point of standup as he&#x27;s trying to argue that standup is not conducive for collaboration.<p>Standup is not the forum for collaboration. Standup, and the three associated questions is purely and simply a dialog enabler. A healthy team has multiple dialog enablers. It&#x27;s what helps break down the invisible barriers of communication and collaboration. ShapeUp recommends another great dialog enabler - appetite. It&#x27;s quite literally why dialog enabler tools like gather.town and Slack Huddles exist - because teams struggle enabling dialog.<p>Cherry on top: Brian opens up by ridiculing appeal to authority, then finishes the article by appealing to authority.<p>&gt; Managers around the world blindly adopt the same standup meeting format, without critical thought to its usefulness. It is the meeting agenda version of “you won’t get fired for buying IBM”.<p>&gt; Now that the latest official Scrum guide has already removed the 3 questions, our industry should consider eliminating them too.

The 3 questions help keep the meeting on track. I was once part of a team that didn&#x27;t follow the &quot;3 questions rule&quot; and all standups were at least 1hr+ in length with a few going to 2-3 hours in length, basically a debugging session with a ton of people on the call that didn&#x27;t need to be there.

It seems like a decent jumping off point for young teams, but any question asked daily will become routine. I know on my team most people reflexively say, “no blockers,” at the end of their standup, even when they have blockers. In some cases they just talked about their blockers for several minutes while talking about what they were working on, then claimed there were no blockers.<p>Mixing it up and asking different questions from time to time can help get people to actually think and provide some new answers.

Yes the good old format of &quot;take an everyday developer routine and attack it, thus causing outrage and clicks&quot;. Standups are necessary. It gives a start in the day. The 3 questions are necessary but short, they are answered in 10 seconds. All the other additional ad-hoc info is what&#x27;s important.

&gt; and suddenly the manager walks on to the pitch and says, “OK, gather around! Where did you kick the ball yesterday? Where are you planning on kicking it today? Any blockers?”<p>There are sports, like handball, where each coach can call a very short timeout at more or less any time during the game for exactly this purpose. The team and coach gets to spend a minute together to adjust their tactics on the fly, based on what is working, and what isn&#x27;t.<p>Otherwise, I agree with the conclusion of this piece, that a manager&#x2F;leader should tailor their meeting(s) to what is required for their specific team to work best. If the team consists of people that all pro-actively communicate, then the meeting might not be needed. If the team has problems with making deliveries on time, then slightly more shepherding is perhaps needed.

I have a product that&#x27;s an alternative to this. [0]<p>It&#x27;s a video shorts hub for your team. You press a hotkey that activates screen &amp; audio recording. You can record little blurbs about things throughout the day.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reharp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reharp.com</a>

As someone who was a project manager before &quot;agile&quot; and during I think it is funny to remember how I used to get pressure go from waterfall planning or kanban to agile with daily stand ups. It always felt like a fad and yet I felt a lot of pressure to get with the program.<p>That phase of my career is long done but my advice to people in that phase is this. Beware of management fads and beware of companies that slavishly adhere to a fad, particular one advocated by consultants. One of the companies I encountered that was most fanatic about &quot;agile methods&quot; was also probably one of the least efficient and slowest to roll out a product. They also had a number of senior execs from management consulting.

We&#x27;ve eliminated a lot of the structures of scrum from our team and it&#x27;s helping be flexible and happier.<p>Since we don&#x27;t have any meetings besides when we actually need to be available to coworkers, standup is now a time for us to hang. &quot;What do you have going on?&quot;. Sometimes it&#x27;s sharing an idea, sometimes it&#x27;s a blocker, or it&#x27;s to show off a little demo of what they did.<p>It&#x27;s not a Frankenstein of postmortem and playtesting and demos and tgif, it&#x27;s just being there for the team every day.

I&#x27;ve found what could be called the SPUR agenda to be useful: Status; Plans; Uncertainties; Risks.†<p>† As I understand it, in economics, &quot;uncertainties&quot; are things that simply <i>can&#x27;t</i> be known; &quot;risks&quot; are things that have known outcome possibilities but it&#x27;s not (yet) known which will happen, e.g., which sides of a pair of dice will come up. This is from a book I&#x27;m reading, <i>Fluke</i>, by Brian Klass.

Talking about what I did&#x2F;what I’m planning to do on a regular cadence forces me to reflect on my time spent and makes me more focused. I also love hearing what others are up to because it promotes collaboration between us. The latter point is completely ignored by the author.<p>However, the blockers question is a waste of time. Blockers should be resolved as fast as possible, not wait until the next scheduled meeting.

I disagree. They&#x27;re a great way to quickly get a status update on how things are progressing, what progress is going to be made today, and what is potentially blocking that progress.<p>Stand-ups meetings by definition are activity focused and not outcome focused. You don&#x27;t need a daily reminder of what the outcome is, but you do need a daily status update as to how you&#x27;re moving towards achieving that outcome.

Stand ups suck, long live stand ups. It&#x27;s like any other meeting, signal to noise ratio is quite low, but what&#x27;s the alternative? I love remote work, hope to never go back into an office, but humans are social animals. I feel like if I don&#x27;t get some face time with people, communication becomes challenging. Chalk it up to overhead.

I have always complemented the three questions with a row-by-row look at the current stories or goals for the team, with the guiding question there being “what do we need to do to achieve this goal?”<p>The two are complementary in that the person-by-person polling helps flush out which people might need some extra help or swap around tasks.

Honestly, any and all of these fads - Scrum or whatever - are just ways for poor managers to feel important. Oh, and for expensive consultants to earn money.<p>If you have a solid team, literally any methodology will work. The best methodology is the one the team chooses, and that may well change for each particular project.

I can&#x27;t help but have a negative reaction to having this discussion at all. All human beings are unique and different. Getting a group of them together means you will have a unique group dynamic.<p>Each team needs to develop a process that meets the needs of the group. For some teams standups are useless because the team is on the high end of the communication spectrum and also on the high end of the process spectrum, meaning they communicate well and update their tickets. Other teams are on the low end of both of these and benefit from standups and management structure that forces improvements to both of those.<p>Agile is about building systems, tools, and processes that allow your team to win. That requires understanding how your team operates and what they need to do their best work. There will never be a right answer to the majority of these types of questions.

&gt; Managers around the world blindly adopt the same standup meeting format, without critical thought to its usefulness. It is the meeting agenda version of “you won’t get fired for buying IBM”.<p>The business term for this is &quot;best practice&quot;.