Siddharth Saoji 
Daily stand-ups have become a staple ritual in tech companies, but are they actually helping or hurting your team?
The Case For Daily Stand-Ups
- They keep the entire team informed about project progress.
- They create accountability by requiring team members to report daily on their work.
- With meeting notes, the documentation remains fresh.
The Case Against Daily Stand-Ups
- They foster mistrust and anxiety when team members feel pressured to justify their contribution every single day.
- They create unnecessary overhead, forcing people to break focus and context-switch from deep work to attend meetings.
- Knowledge work doesn’t progress linearly like physical labor, it ebbs and flows between thinking phases and milestone achievements. Daily updates don’t align with this reality.
- Top performers often view daily check-ins as micromanagement that undermines their autonomy, damaging morale and engagement.
If no stand ups then what?
Stand ups serve 2 purposes:
- Remove blockers quicker
- Keep everyone informed
OK so main question we need to ask for 1 is, why does it need a scheduled meeting for people to voice out blockers, why can’t a slack message solve it for the blocked stakeholder? Generally answered by lack of clarity on the team for the target date, goal, relevant stakeholder, or lack of trust within the team of being seen as not competent. None which requires aggregating the team everyday for a congressional hearing.
For 2, in the age of LLMs, do we really need to have people voice updates everyday? No we don’t.
Stand ups as I see them are really an expensive (costing productivity) bandage to symptoms rather than a cure for much deeper organisational issues.