The standup started at 9:00. By 9:03, everyone was back at their desks.
This wasn't a failure. This was the goal.
I'd worked on teams where standups lasted thirty minutes. Sometimes longer. People would give detailed updates about what they'd done yesterday, what they were doing today, and what might possibly block them if certain conditions arose. Others would ask clarifying questions. Side conversations would start. Someone would share their screen.
By the time it ended, half the morning was gone, and nobody remembered what anyone else had said.
This team was different. The standup had one purpose: surface blockers. That was it.
If you weren't blocked, you said nothing. If you were blocked, you said what you needed. If someone could help, they'd follow up after. The meeting existed to create those follow-up conversations, not to replace them.
Most days, nobody was blocked. The standup was a brief acknowledgment that we were all still working on the same thing, and then it was over.
This felt strange at first. Weren't we supposed to share what we were working on? Weren't we supposed to stay aligned? Wasn't the whole point of a standup to keep everyone informed?
But we were already informed. We worked in the same codebase. We saw each other's pull requests. We talked throughout the day when we needed to. The standup wasn't adding information — it was duplicating it, in a less efficient format.
The three-minute standup worked because everything else worked. People trusted each other. Communication happened naturally. The meeting was a safety net, not a crutch.
I've since seen teams try to copy this and fail. They'd shorten the standup without fixing the underlying problems. People would stay silent, but the blockers would remain. The meeting would end quickly, but nothing would get unblocked.
A short standup isn't a goal. It's a symptom. It means the team already knows what's happening, already trusts each other to ask for help, already has channels for the conversations that matter.
If your standup takes thirty minutes, the problem isn't the standup. The problem is everything that's not happening outside of it.
The three-minute standup was never about efficiency. It was about having so little to say in a meeting because everything important was already being said elsewhere.