For two years, our 11-person team did the classic 9am standup. Fifteen minutes on paper, forty-five in reality. Someone always had a quick question that turned into a project.
The problem: standups are optimised for presence, not for information flow. People read off their Jira tickets, and everyone nods.
What we replaced it with: an async written check-in every morning in Slack — yesterday, today, blockers. Ten minutes of the whole team's time, zero interruption.
What worked: the written record is searchable, and introverts speak louder. Nobody has to perform productivity.
What didn't: nobody liked it at first. Give it a month. The muscle memory shifts.
Now we do one meeting per week — a decision meeting. Everything else is async. The velocity doubled, the complaints dropped to zero.