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When a standup or retro stops working, the instinct is to change or cut it. This article looks at why that rarely helps, and how to diagnose the underlying condition a ceremony might be exposing.
Most engineering managers have sat through a standup that was clearly a waste of time. Nobody raised their actual blockers, updates sounded performative, and the meeting somehow felt both rushed and pointless at the same time.
The natural reaction is to assume the meeting itself is broken.
So the team experiments. Maybe the standup becomes async. Maybe it moves to twice a week. Mayb…