[theptip]

One important practice to keep daily standup snappy is to decouple the high level context (“I am blocked on X” => “you should talk to codeowners Alice and Bob”) from the actual solve for the problem, even if there is a quick answer.

It’s natural to answer “I am blocked” with a dive into the solution, but really you should just use the standup forum to figure out who you need to talk to, and circle back to discuss immediately after the meeting.

If you already know who you need to deep dive with, you should proactively sync with them before standup; that meeting is really just there to provide a cap on the amount of time anyone can spend blocked.

If everyone self-organizes to resolve blockers before the next standup then congrats, you have graduated and perhaps you don’t need that meeting daily any more.

It’s worth noting that in the “yesterday, today, blockers” format, the first two aren’t really needed if you just radiate context passively. The main value of the meeting is syncing on current/future blockers/impediments.

Finally I’d say a document-centric workflow can help here, because if you are all collaborating on design in a doc, then it’s easy to follow along async and see the latest state of the discussion, rather than having to read and understand every comment in Slack to keep up with the situation.

[Vanit]

This. At my current company any blockers that need more than a minute discussion inline get moved to an optional "parking lot" session at the end of standup. The point of this isn't to deepdive but just give a people a bit more support by ensuring there's a plan in place to either solve or further discuss the issue. I've found this really useful, but you need some discipline to not deepdive the parking lot - although sometimes if your team is desperately in need of more alignment, just do it. People not process, and all that :)