Rethinking Rituals: Why Daily Standups Might Be Hurting Your Team

I know, I know. This may be controversial, but hear me out.

Look, I'm not anti-meeting. I'm anti-ritual-for-the-sake-of-ritual.

And that's what daily standups have become for a lot of teams. We do them because "that's what Agile teams do," not because we've actually asked ourselves if they're still working.

Here's what I've seen happen:

Your best developer finally hits their groove at 9:45am. Then bam — standup at 10. Flow state? Gone.

The updates become background noise. "Yesterday I did X, today I'm doing Y, no blockers." Rinse, repeat, check the box.

Half your remote team is barely awake (or barely paying attention). Can you blame them?

And here's the thing — everything being said in that standup is already written down somewhere. Jira. Linear. Slack. GitHub. Pick your poison.

So what if we flipped the script?

What if we only met when there was an actual blocker? Or a real dependency to untangle?

What if updates were async — a quick Loom, a Slack thread, a Notion check-in — so people could catch up without breaking their focus?

The best teams I've worked with don't meet daily. They communicate constantly and meet intentionally.

Maybe it's time we stop treating "daily standup" as gospel and start asking: Is this actually helping us ship better work?

What's your take? Are daily standups still valuable in 2025, or are they just Agile theater at this point?

Drop a comment — I'd genuinely love to hear how your team handles this. And if this resonated, hit repost so more folks can weigh in.

Or if you're rethinking how your team works and want to chat about what actually moves the needle — reach out. Always happy to talk shop.

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