What I've found is pretty useless is manager-driven daily standups where the purpose is to go through all the items and get detailed status updates. I sort of

What I've found is pretty useless is manager-driven daily standups where the purpose is to go through all the items and get detailed status updates. I sort of infer that this happens through a broader management culture where managers get pop quizzes at meetings all week long where they have to be able to appear like they have the finger on the pulse of exactly what their reports are doing, which produces downwards pressure to micromanage. Even if they aren't micromanaging, it becomes this daily quiz so that the manager knows exactly what is going on. What was pretty useful was when daily standups were more IC driven and it was perfectly fine to say "yep, I'm working on the same thing I was doing yesterday" at least half the time. In those kinds of standups the Manager will typically bring broader concerns to the team that might have happened in the past 24h, rather than using the standup to quiz the team on what they're doing. The manager of course also gets to just give their own status as "meetings, meetings, meetings" and keep it short. In those cases we didn't even go through the Kanban board or have it open during the meeting, since everyone understood that you only have one or two things you're typically working on and your status is either that you're working on the same thing as yesterday or something is done and you're picking up something else. In some cases someone would be stuck or some issue would have come up, but this would usually result in two ICs taking over the zoom chat after 15 minutes and letting everyone else drop off. For brand new team members or junior devs this still works basically the same way but there would usually a bit more heavy use of after-meeting zoom chats or async chats afterwards. The formalism of doing it every day does work, particularly with remote teams, just to have a little bit of face to face time, and spur those after meeting or async zoom chats. But it needs to be kept lightweight and focused on developer-productivity and doesn't use any kind of issue board most days.