Honestly, as both a regular engineer and a team lead, I now understand the point of stand-ups. They are a blunt tool to micro-manage work. And I love it. In da

Honestly, as both a regular engineer and a team lead, I now understand the point of stand-ups. They are a blunt tool to micro-manage work. And I love it. In daily stand-ups, I go over all our current in-progress & blocked issues in Kanban. I ask about every task someone is working on or is blocked. Besides helping people unblock work, I also ask questions about in-progress work when something seems unusual. I can often either identify duplicate work, give someone information they would have spent time trying to find, or ask someone to rework something if a given solution looks like it will be a dead end. There is no more efficient way for me to do all of those things in one place. Using this method, I can constantly help prune work in progress in one short spurt of time. It benefits junior engineers who are still learning how to juggle tasks. And it helps the team in general, as a lead is making sure there are tickets on the board and pushing when no progress is being made. As long as someone is actually doing something at the stand-up, it is definitely useful. If you do it poorly, it's going to suck. I've been part of a lot of sucky, pointless stand-ups. I now make a point to ask more questions in those stand-ups if I think the lead/scrum master/etc isn't probing enough. It often starts a brief discussion that leads to meaningful work.