Daily standup

A daily standup is a brief recurring meeting where each team member answers three questions: what did I finish since yesterday, what am I working on today, and is anything blocking me? It's called a "standup" because keeping everyone on their feet is a crude time-box — nobody wants to stand for an hour, so the meeting stays short. It originated in scrum but is now used loosely across many teams.

What standups are supposed to do

The real value isn't the status update — a board already shows status. It's surfacing blockers fast, so a teammate who's stuck for a day doesn't stay stuck for a week. A good standup catches the "oh, I'm waiting on the API spec" comment and turns it into a five-minute hallway fix immediately after.

How standups go wrong

Standups degrade into status theater when people recite a list of tickets to a manager instead of coordinating with each other. They balloon past 15 minutes when problem-solving happens in the meeting rather than being taken offline. And they become pure overhead on teams small enough that everyone already knows what everyone else is doing.

Why a team of three rarely needs one

If you're three people who talk all day in a shared channel, a scheduled standup adds a meeting to replace communication you already have. The information a standup surfaces — progress and blockers — is visible on a kanban board and in your chat history. Async "what I'm on today" notes often work better than a synchronous ceremony.

How GritShip handles this

GritShip has no standup feature, no daily-check-in prompts, and no status-report generation. The board is the status: one glance shows what's in progress and what's stuck. For small teams, that visibility is meant to replace the standup, not supplement it.