Why Standups Fail (and How to Fix Them)

Episode Transcript

Welcome to The Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas, and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing.

Every week, we unpack the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing, from building high-velocity workflows and slashing waste to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams.

You'll hear quick-hit strategies you can deploy today plus candid stories from marketers who've traded chaos for clarity and never looked back. And because no sherpa summits alone,  I'll be joined by trailblazing guests, coaches, practitioners, CMOs, and other experts, sharing the sharp tactics and hard-won lessons that keep them on the leading edge. So lace up those virtual hiking boots, limit your WIP, and let's start ascending. This is your weekly shot of practical, no-fluff, Agile insight so you can deliver more value with less busy work and love your marketing again.

Hit follow wherever you listen, and let's carve the next switchback together. Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of The Agile Marketing Edge. Ah, stand-ups, one of the most loved or hated of all Agile meetings.

They are supposed to be one of the most powerful tools in our toolkit, but far too often, they devolve into a dreaded daily torture.

So this week, we are diving in to all the reasons that stand-ups fail, and most importantly, what you can do about that if it is happening to you.

So, first and foremost, what is a stand-up, and why do we have them? So, stand-ups originally got their name from the suggestion that every attendee stand during the meeting in order to encourage brevity.

They are intended to be a daily 15-minute connection point among all members of an Agile team in which they discuss three things: What did I do yesterday?

What shall I do today? And what blockers are preventing me from making progress? This is meant to keep the agenda and content very tight and focused so that we do not devolve into solutioning or meandering discussions about how so-and-so never gives us feedback on time.

Over time, the stand-up component of the name has become, uh, less required, especially with more and more teams being hybrid or virtual. The requirement to have everyone stand is kind of silly, um, and not ultimately completely inclusive, and so we call ours a daily huddle. You can call it a sync, whatever name you want to give it. Uh, we're calling it a stand-up here for good shared understanding of the topic, but really, the name is less important than the reason that it exists.

And the reason that this meeting exists is because, on an Agile team, we are moving quickly and delivering value often, typically in cycles measured in weeks, not months, certainly not quarters. And so when we are talking about 14 or 21-day work cycles, a lot can happen very quickly, and so having frequent touch points for the team to discuss progress is really important so things don't veer too far off-track.

So that is the origin of the daily stand-up. It was originally designed, as I said, to be a daily meeting.

We'll talk a little bit about whether that's required or beneficial. Uh, it's a little bit of a choose-your-own-adventure situation there, but as with most of the things that we talk about on this podcast, think about the purpose of this practice before you get too wrapped around the axle about whether you're doing it "right," quotey fingers, "right." Uh, is it serving you? Is it doing what it's meant to do? It's meant to keep your team aligned, to keep you moving forward, to allow everyone to rally around major issues and solve them quickly, to surface impediments so that leadership can support you in removing them, and to make sure that the value is delivered when we expect it to be.

So, that's why we do stand-ups. Unfortunately, as with many things from the Agile world, that simple explanation can often mask a lot of heartache, and pain, and dysfunction, because stand-ups can go awry, and in fact, they are one of the meetings that can most quickly go awry.

Because they are so deceptively straightforward, it seems like... I don't know what it is about them that just makes people feel like they can take and run with a stand-up.

Um, they have a very clear purpose, and we gotta keep tight on the purpose in order to make sure that people don't dread them and that they are not just a time suck on everybody's calendar.

So, let's talk about some signals, some symptoms that may indicate that your stand-up has gotten off-track and that an intervention is now required.

Let's start with the, uh, prime...... culprit of, of most stand-ups that go awry, which is we cannot keep our time box. Meetings are intended to be 15 minutes long, no more, and that is so that we're not taking up time on people's calendar. Every single member of the team is intended to be at stand-up, so if this is 30, 45, heaven help us, 60 minutes long, we have sucked up a huge amount of the team's collective working time. So, the time box is actually really, really important.

So, we need to keep it tight. If you are routinely going over 15 minutes and it's not on purpose, then you've got an issue. Now, one, one potential caveat here is if you do have a larger team. If you do have a larger team, you need to go back and listen to the episode about two-pizza teams, because there's a lot of reasons why you should shrink your team down.

But if you do have a larger team, you may need a larger time box because everyone is meant to give their input during this connection meeting. So, you need everyone to speak, and that can take up time if you have a lot of people that need to chime in.

So, if you are struggling, whether you have a large team or not, with keeping the time box, a visible timer that everyone can see is one of the easiest ways to get people back on track. Because most of the time, people don't realize how long they're talking. They're very interested in what they have to say and they wanna keep talking. Most people are like that, and it's not a, not a malicious thing. They're not trying to derail the meeting. They just wanna talk about the work that they're doing 'cause they find it very interesting.

So, divide the number of... Divide 15 minutes by the number of people in your meeting, and that's how many minutes each person gets.

Every time somebody new starts talking, the timer starts over. And when it goes off, that's it. Hard stop.

No running over your time. Be rude as hell about it for a couple of weeks until the habit sticks. And if you're uncomfortable being rude as hell to your team members, designate somebody. Bring in an outside scrum master or something if you need to establish this habit and nobody on the team is comfortable being the timer police.

But the team should be on board with wanting to improve this practice, so everyone should not mind being cut off if they are the culprit of going over their time box. You can rotate people to be the timekeeper, different person every week, whatever you need.

Uh, but you got to get people in the habit and get comfortable calling them out if they're not staying within their allotted time. Same thing if they're going off-topic, right? This is a huge, huge issue. People wanna talk about this interesting conversation that they had with so-and-so yesterday, or, "You'll never believe how my sales call went." All of these things are really oftentimes very important. But they are not within the scope of this connection meeting, right? The daily connection meeting is what I do in the last 24 hours, but we can add one more extra piece of description there, that's moving the team forward.

So, they don't need to know that I went to the gym or that I had a dentist appointment or that my kid got sick and I had to go and pick them up. Unless the kid getting sick is what prevented me from getting my deliverables completed. Then they probably need to know why I'm behind.

But unless the thing that happened impacted the work you're doing for the team, it's off-limits and we don't talk about it.

So, if you're struggling with keeping people on topic, you can add that modifier. What did I do in the last 24 hours to drive this team forward?

What am I gonna do in the next 24 hours to drive this team forward, right? So, in the most, in most cases, that excludes meetings from the conversation.

No need to know you're having a meeting. We need to know about the work that's on the board. That's what we need to know about, and that's what we're gonna talk about. So, just like with the timer, if people are meandering and getting very loosey-goosey with the topics that they're covering, somebody has gotta bring them back. You have a dedicated Agile lead or scrum master or project manager, somebody on the team who's in charge of process.

This is their time to shine and gently but firmly redirect. And just like with timekeeping, you're gonna have to be rude as hell for a little while and not mind interrupting people so that you can build the habit and get the discipline installed. And then after a while, you won't have to c- it won't come up anymore.

One more issue kind of in this family, it's not quite the same, but it is another potential root cause of the meeting going over time box, is that some people hog all the airtime because they think they're the most important person. So, this isn't the same as somebody just getting off-topic and kind of getting a little overexcited and carried away with their update. This is a bit more of, "My project is the most important.

Everyone, please sit down and listen to my critical update because I am the star of the stand-up meeting." So, in those cases, you may need to take that conversation offline, right?Uh, and this is gonna be if you have tried to redirect someone, you've tried the timer and they are not responding to these coaching type techniques and they are still, "This is the Andrea Show and Andrea talks for 80% of the connection meeting," it's not okay and we need to address that. Letting it go unaddressed demonstrates to everybody else in the meeting that yes, in fact, that person is allowed to break the rules and it's reinforcing the perception that that person's work is most important and it's gonna eventually undermine all the psychological safety, all of the empowerment that you're trying to build up in your small and powerful Agile marketing team.

So you gotta address those things. Uh, it's gonna be a hard conversation but it will benefit the team over the long term. All right, those are the usual culprits for going over the time box.

Last tip that I'll add for how to help keep the time box intact is the use of a 16th minute.

So, the daily connection meeting or the daily stand-up is meant to be 15 minutes and so what my team does and what many Agile teams do is block 30 minutes on the team's calendar so that other meetings won't get scheduled but the latter 15 is just open. We finish stand-up conversations, most of the time, at 15 minutes and then if there are topics that need additional discussion, additional clarity, maybe a decision needs to be made or we need a light working session, only the team members who have something to contribute to that stay for the second 15 minutes and everybody else can leave. So we get the opportunity to go quickly deeper into a single topic or maybe two if we're really quick, uh, and that allows people to kind of put a pin in something and know that they're gonna get a quick response and lets them stay in their two to three, four-minute time box that they need to keep the meeting moving.

Okay. Other symptoms of an ailing stand-up. Nothing changes after the meeting.

The board doesn't change, nobody's priorities change, the person responsible for something doesn't change, nothing. Everything exactly the same after every single stand-up meeting.

So why have it? Why even get everyone together if nothing is going to be different? An excellent question. The root cause of this tends to be that you don't really have a team together.

You maybe have people whose work, like, is adjacent to each other but they don't really collaborate, they can't really support each other and so in stand-up they might not even be listening to each other because what that person says doesn't really affect me.

If they are behind, I can't help them. If they are behind it doesn't delay my work so what do I care?

Right? And this can also be rooted in a poor, poorly visualized board. So if the board doesn't reflect what the team is actually doing and it's just sort of there for show then again it's not gonna change after people give their updates because there's a lot of non-board work that's happening that maybe no one's talking about because it's not visualized and we use the board to focus our conversation.

So you want stand-up or a connection meeting to be an inflection point. This should be a moment of ensuring that the next 24 hours of work is going to be the exact right stuff that should be done to push the team forward and help it meet its goals so sometimes that will be a reshuffle of work or a reprioritization or a change of owner because I got behind but my work is critical and so somebody else has to pick it up. Those things should be happening probably not every single meeting but often. Again, otherwise why are we having the meeting? It should be a recalibration of the work being done. Another symptom of a lackluster meeting is on the days that it doesn't happen, maybe too many people are on vacation or there was a conflict of some kind and it just gets deleted, nobody notices a difference and if it happened three or four days in a row that the meeting didn't happen nothing would be different. Right? This is very closely connected to the last symptom but this is how connection meetings get canceled. We don't have a few, nobody notices any difference and people start saying, "Well why did we even do this? Can't we just stop?" Right? 'Cause who doesn't want less meetings on their calendars? Everybody wants less meetings so this one seems like a nice easy cut it, call it a day. Again, this could happen because the work being done isn't on the board, because this isn't really a team that isn't really working together and/or people are getting pulled off of board work and into other things and so the board is kind of like a perfect world would look like this but reality is a completely different thing.

So when the board stops reflecting reality and we spend stand-up only talking about the board-... then standup is a fiction. It's meant to be what's really going on with the team.

So, we need to be able to be honest and open, and the board needs to be honest and true about the work that's being done. So, another symptom of a similar root cause is poor attendance, or people zoning out after their turn.

So, maybe they're there, but they do their, "What I did yesterday, what I did today. I got no blockers," and then their camera's off and they're on mute and you can tell that they're not paying attention. All right, again, this isn't really a team.

They're not looking for opportunities to collaborate. They're not looking for ways to support their colleagues in driving toward the value that the team is responsible for, and we're just going through the motions. This is a zombie agile situation.

So, this is not the way that a connection meaning is meant to go. A lot of this comes from the feeling that we can't help each other. There's no opportunity to give help or feedback, and so why even talk? Why even bring it up? Why even ask for help when everybody is heads down in their own lane?

As we get better at broadening our capabilities with our good friend, AI, this, I hope very fervently, will become less of an issue because it should be easier for people who are familiar with one another's work to plug into different kinds of marketing activities. We should be a bit more interchangeable, a bit more cross-functional, and hopefully that's not a scary thing for you to hear, but an encouraging and empowering thing to hear because it's an opportunity to work more closely, to be more collaborative, to be more connected with your colleagues instead of in your silo where nobody understands what you do and you can't ever get any help or go home or to switch off. That's not a healthy way to work, and we have the opportunity to build out more cross-functional teams because AI can help us do that. And so again, highly recommend you go back and listen to the episode about Two Pizza Teams and Why Small Teams Win in the Age of AI because this is really correlated closely to what we're talking about, about a standup being broken because a team isn't really a team.

All right. Another symptom. This one's icky. This is an icky symptom. I'm gonna, ugh. I, when I was writing the, the outline for this episode and I was, I got to this one, I was like, "Ugh."

Because as a leader, um, this one's the worst. Just the absolute worst. And this is when you go through an entire sprint's worth of daily meetings and everything's fine, everything's fine. No, I don't need help. No, I have no blockers. And then on the last day of the sprint, like two cards are done. 90% of the work is still either in the backlog or in progress, and no work is done.

Maddening. Just so frustrating. Why, if everything was fine and there were no blockers and nobody needed help, did none of the work get done?

Let's go back to the purpose of daily huddles. To drive the work that the team has committed to forward.

As a group, deliver value within the chosen time box. That's what we should be doing in these meetings. It's not just a checkbox. It's not just a rattle through my to-do list from yesterday and talk about how many meetings I was in.

That is not the point of this meeting. So, if everything is fine and no work's getting done, you've got a trust problem, you've got a psychological safety problem, and you probably have an over-commitment problem.

People are too optimistic about what they can do, and so they over-commit when they are planning their next few weeks of work, and then they're too afraid to tell you when they realize what they've done. Yeah.

So you gotta make it okay to speak up. I've seen teams where they try to kinda overindex on that at first. So anybody that admits to being overextended, admits to over-committing is rewarded.

Starbucks gift card, right? Because you admitted that. We need to reinforce that kind of behavior for a little while until it becomes natural for the team. At the very least, right? Leadership needs to verbally and effusively acknowledge and encourage people to speak up, right?

Because it doesn't do you any good for people to say, "Yes. We're gonna get all 30 of these projects done in the next month," and then only 5 of them get done.

M- f- far better to commit to 10 and finish 10. So much better. Twice as much work gets done. So committing to more than you can accomplish is not a, is not a good thing. This is not a badge of honor.

We've started, uh, using a phrase over on, at my team to try to counteract this tendency 'cause we're all very motivated and high achieving people and we wanna do a lot. So, the phrase is over-committing is underperforming.

It hits a little hard, but it's a good reminder that-Saying you can do more than you can is not only unrealistic, but it's it's not helpful to the team.

So, whew, you can tell, I have feelings. I have feelings about that one. I don't like that one. So, we're gonna move, we're gonna move on. Next one. Your s- your daily stand-up, your daily connection meeting, your daily huddle, whatever you wanna call it, isn't serving you well if your project manager or your scrum master or your team lead is the only person who talks. I've seen this happen many a time, where one person has a board open, sharing their screen, and they are going through each card, each work item. "Okay.

Here's one card. So-and-so is working on it. Looks like this happened, and they met with so-and-so, and there's an update on that document. Cool. Anything to add, so-and-so? Great. And now let's open this card, and that's this person, and they did this."

And it's, uh, they just talk the whole time, sharing what everybody else did. This one also is icky. Um, but again, it usually doesn't come from a bad place. The person wants to make sure that the process is running well and that processes are followed, steps are adhered to. But what it does is take away the ownership of the board, of the meeting, of the work items from the team itself.

They're not incentivized now to update those work items or to make sure that they're really accurate and reflective of what they're doing, and they don't belong to them. All right? And so, this is a really troublesome one that does need to be addressed. Right? And so this is, uh... And it's also an easy one to fix for the most part, because you just change the format of the meeting. Each person speaks to their card. Or you can even go more purist and have them just talk about what they did last 24, next 24. It's a shorter step to have them talk about each card, so that's more similar to how this meeting is sometimes run in that situation.

Either way works, but you don't want just one person talking in stand-up. No good. Okay.

We've covered a lot. As you can tell, there are a lot of ways for a daily meeting to go awry.

So, I wanna summarize a few and bring in a couple of last best practices before we wrap up. One, get a timer and use it religiously until your team can hold its 15-minute time box and until everybody on the team can stay within their individually allotted time for their personal updates.

Number two, take a critical look at your visualized work, uh, your Kanban board, and the work on it, and make sure it's real.

Does it really reflect what's happening on the team and that it's shared work and not just a bunch of non-connected stuff that we just threw into the same Jira board? Actively encourage openness about things that come up and prevent work from being done.

This is our third one. Consider rewarding the team members who bring up these challenges so that you can build this habit in the team.

So, this fourth one we haven't covered yet, so we're now, we're into some of these additional best practices that you can try.

AI meeting notes are a great supplement to these daily meetings.

They can really help with accountability, especially around what people said they'll do within the next 24 hours. So, that usually gets captured pretty well when people make a commitment or say they'll do a thing. And then you can use that as a guide in the next huddle to say, "Hey, Andrea, you said you would do one, two, three things in the next 24 hours.

Did you get to all of those?" And it's a great, again, way to build up the habit and the rigor around say you'll do a thing, do that thing, lather, rinse, repeat. So, AI can help us a lot in this regard.

Okay, next best practice. We're on number five here, which is apropos because it's about fi- meeting five times per week. Sometimes that is not always reasonable or necessary.

As I said, the way that daily stand-ups were originally intended, it was every day at the start of the day for co-located teams who worked in the same physical location.

For many of us, that pendulum is sort of swinging back the other way right now, but for many of us, this is not the reality.

So, get pragmatic about the timing and the frequency of your meetings. Remember, we, we care way more about the purpose and accomplishing the goal of this meeting than checking the box that we did it every day, every day, every day.

So, maybe it's three times a week. Maybe it's twice a week. I would suggest not going fewer than twice a week, or you will absolutely not be able to hold your time box and it's gonna start to feel a lot more status update and less...... quick hitting, are we collaborating? Is the work moving forward? You're gonna lose that feeling of it. So, two's probably the lowest you can go, but three is super doable.

Uh, and this is now we're onto number six, which is a partner to number five.

If you span a huge number of time zones, you can also get creative about your timing by doing kind of a tag team thing.

So, I've had some teams where we- they will do two meetings and it- a morning and an evening or late afternoon and there's one person who attends both and then becomes the connector between the teams with very different time zones. And so you might have like a U.S. team that has an AM, and then if we get into like the APAC, the Asia posi- Pacific group that's gonna have their morning meeting, which is like U.S. night meeting, is there a way that we can have one person go to both?

And then they can hand off work between the two, so that you still get the ability to have a collaborative conversation, uh, and don't rely totally on asynchronous updates.

But again, think about the purpose of our stand up, move the work forward, collaborate effectively and efficiently. So, get creative about the ways you can do that and still leverage this style of meeting.

And you can try async- asynchronous updates from time to time. We do this at our team a lot if we have several people that are gonna miss a stand up, there's really no point, we're a team of less than 10. And so if we have two or three people out, it kind of isn't really that much worth it to have the meeting, and so we'll just do a Slack update. What'd I do yesterday? What am I doing today? Blockers, right? And just type it out or send a little Loom video, whatever. Again, we're accomplishing the goal, but we're not necessarily adhering so strictly to the time boxed conversation.

So, another way that you can keep the spirit alive and keep accomplishing the goal. Last, but certainly not least, my husband introduced me to this practice and I love it, social stand ups. So once a week, once every other week, throw it in whenever you feel like, just have a social question, like an icebreaker type question. You know, if you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go? One of our favorites that we did at our team was if you had to be a lawyer, would you be a prosecutor or a defender?

People gave answers I was not expecting, so interesting. So you get to know your team a little better, it's great for building comradery, um, but it can replace stand up if it starts to feel a little bit too stale and boring.

All right. Hopefully if you are stuck in a less than fun daily meeting, this helps to unblock you and give you a little bit more fire, a little bit more enthusiasm the next time you get together with your team. So thank you for being here with me and until next time remember, the struggle is real, but so is agile marketing.