“Wait, there’s a meeting every day?” That was the question I was interrupted with while explaining the rhythm of Scrum to a new team. This concern is both familiar and understandable. Ask almost anyone if they want more meetings, and their answer is a clear “no.”

You may be asking why Scrum has all these meetings and do we really need them all? 

Those are great questions to dive into. In this post, I’m focusing on the Daily Scrum, also called the Daily Standup. It’s one of the first meetings new teams ask about because it happens every day.

The Daily standup is a brief daily check-in for the Scrum team. When I say brief, I mean it. Think 15 minutes or less. It’s called a standup because it’s so short you don’t need to sit down.

This article with cover four essential topics for the daily scrum

1. How the daily standup keeps your team focused.
2. Who participates in the daily standup.
3. The agenda for the daily standup.
4. How the daily standup save you time.

The Daily Scrum/Standup keeps the team focused and collaborative.

Every day for fifteen minutes, the development team inspects the previous day's work, plans the next day’s work and identifies any barriers to getting things done. You may be thinking, “Really? A meeting every day?” The Standup keeps the team in sync by making the work visible. 

In a sense, every day, they review, re-prioritize and re-plan the work for the sprint. And all that in 15 minutes. These daily adjustments keep the team very focused on what to do, and it also immediately highlights problems to address quickly.

This clarity often reduces the overall number of meetings and communication. The team stays up to date on their work, what obstacles they face, and what changes they make. This focus and agility significantly increase the team’s effectiveness. Doing the right work without getting stuck on obstacles creates an incredible ROI for a 15-minute meeting. 

The Standup keeps the team in sync by making the work visible. 

The Standup is held at the same time and place each day. This simple consistency removes the need for communication and coordination of schedules, and it quickly becomes an essential part of the team's rhythm.

The whole Scrum Team participates in the Daily Standup.

Everyone in the Scrum team comes to the Standup. But it’s not just an attendance thing, and participation is critical. Let’s walk through how each role participates.

The development team sets the structure for the daily standup

The dev team is the ones who do most all of the talking because they are doing the work. They set the meeting structure and decide what questions they will ask or what order they will go in. They provide updates and ask questions of one another. 

The scrum master attends and helps the team learn to run the daily scrum.

The meeting is the team’s responsibility and they are accountable. If the team identifies a problem and immediately goes into problem-solving mode, the Scrum master might remind them about the focus of the daily Scrum and ask if they have enough clarity to wait until after the meeting to continue creating a solution.

The scrum master is also paying attention to obstacles that surface. I would usually keep a list of what I hear during the meeting and immediately follow up with people to see how we could get them unstuck. 

The product owner is there to listen and respond.

The product owner doesn’t need to give any updates, but they still have two critical roles during the meeting. 

1. The product owner can answer questions from the development team about the work.
2. The product owner listens to understand how the work is going and better understand what obstacles the team is encountering.

Keep the daily standup to just the Scrum team.

It can be tempting for other leaders in the organization to want to attend the Standup, and I don’t recommend this. It changes the environment from a collaborative engagement to status updates that feel more like reading a presentation than solving a problem. This meeting is for the team, not the organization, and those leaders can attend the sprint review to see how the work progresses.

If the team is colocated, the meeting should happen next to the Scrum board, where all the work can be visible and actively referenced during the session. If they are a distributed team, the board should be visible to everyone. I’ve found the Standup to be a critical cadence for keeping distributed teams in sync.

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The Daily Scrum has a clear agenda.

The daily standup is not a complicated meeting. Everyone on the development team answers three questions:

1. What have I finished?
2. What will I complete today?
3. Is anything getting in my way?

I’ve seen these questions tweaked at times, but they serve essentially the same functions of making the work visible and actively evaluating the progress.

It’s common for one team member to share they are having trouble with something, and another team member says, “I can help with that.”  That’s all they need to discuss at that moment, and the meeting can keep moving forward.

These questions help focus the conversation and move the meeting along. It will take some work to learn to keep the meeting to 15 minutes. The discussion is short, light, and focused. If the team needs to address an obstacle, write it down and tackle it after completing the daily scrum. 

Inevitably, someone will ask, “Can we just provide our updates in Slack?” Don’t do it. The shared presence and focus of the Standup are critical for keeping the team aligned, and this just isn’t the same in a Slack thread. I have seen teams use Slack to support their standup by posting their answers as they share them. This practice is helpful because it provides a place for those follow-up conversations. But the danger is that team members start having a side convo and are no longer engaged with the whole team.

The Daily Scrum decreases your time in meetings.

Meetings are notoriously inefficient. We’ve all been to meetings that could have been an email, and I am continually trying to shorten and reduce my number of appointments.  And as counterintuitive as it may seem, adding this meeting lowers the team’s overall meeting load.

I see two key areas where the daily Scrum reduces meeting time.

1. Status updates during your weekly team meetings. The weekly team meeting seems to be a staple of traditional teams, and status updates usually take a significant amount of time. These updates are now happening daily, and the team has a better awareness of how things are going than they ever had. In reality, this whole weekly team meeting is no longer needed. 
2. Those meetings that aren’t on your calendar. What meetings am I talking about? Hint, they happen at your desk, where you were trying to work. Interruptions are exceptionally costly to productivity, and the daily Scrum helps reduce interruptions by concentrating those conversations within the meeting itself.

So let’s look at the math here.

15 minutes * 5 days a week = 75 minutes used.‍

10-minute interruption * 8 times a week = 80 minutes
30 minutes of status updates during your weekly team meetings.
80 + 30 = 120 minutes saved.

I tried to underestimate how many interruptions people experience on traditional teams, and I also didn’t include the lost effectiveness from the interruption itself. It takes you 25 minutes to get back on track after an interruption.  Add that in, and you’re saving another 200 minutes per week!

Time savings don’t come just from meetings. Time is saved by not having team members stuck or working on something no longer needed. That kind of inefficiency can go on way too long in traditional teams.

Keep Learning about Scrum

I hope this helped you get a good overview of the Daily Scrum.  If you want to learn more about the other meetings or roles in Scrum, check out the links below. Or, if you want it all in one place, see the What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

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