Hoo nelly! You’ve asked a question that can easily get HN to write 50+ pages. Hope you like reading! To make a meeting matter, make a decision. You can make th

Hoo nelly! You’ve asked a question that can easily get HN to write 50+ pages. Hope you like reading! To make a meeting matter, make a decision. You can make the daily stand up ritual into something meaningful to the participants, if you recast it as “let’s decide what we’re gonna do today.” If it is just a progress update, then it can be done better asynchronously. But, the daily stand up actually does increase productivity as a status update, if the work is not planned out properly. So let me get into what that means: in theory, on any software project, there is a dependency graph of steps which have to be done in order to achieve the next release. This graph also has implicit dependencies just because we have finite resources and one person can't do everything at once. The steps also come with some time estimate, and then we know that there is uncertainty in that estimate so we add safety buffer. Whether the work is planned out properly comes down to whether this safety buffer is spent, or squandered. If the most important thing is not being worked on, if it is sitting waiting for review say, or if it is just an ugly messy task that nobody wants to pick up: then your safety buffer is getting spent but you're not getting much for it. And the easiest place that this happens is at the start of a new release when there seems to be so much abundant safety buffer that it is now time to play and relax and experiment with random ideas. In fact, give arbitrary amounts of safety buffer to a poorly planned software project, and it will overrun whatever buffer you give it, simply because of this lack of urgency at the start, it becomes even less urgent if it's not due in one quarter but is instead due in three quarters. So that is where standup comes in and imposes an artificial urgency. And somebody randomly happens to work on the critical path and it starts moving forward. Until you run into a big ugly problem that nobody wants to solve on the critical path, then the project gets delayed until there are no other things to work on, someone has to slog through the pain. you still miss the deadline but not by nearly as much as you were. Lights a candle under everyone's ass. It's not the right approach, the right approach would light a bonfire under one person's ass, the exact right person's ass, until they passed the baton to the next person.