Ask HN: Have you been in a team that did “daily standups” asynchronously?

In the past, all of my teams have had daily-standup meetings. Ie, recurring meetings scheduled for a specific time, when everyone would join the meeting (either physically or virtually) and give their updates

In an attempt to reduce people's meeting load and avoid interruptions, we're considering doing asynchronous slack standups instead. Ie, everyone posts their daily-update on slack at the start of their workday (no specific time). People can then follow up either on slack, or in-person, or offline, regarding any of the updates that others have posted.

Has anyone had experience with doing similar asynchronous daily updates, as an alternative to daily standup meetings? If so, how did it go?

At my small company with 4 developers we post YTB: yesterday, today, blockers. It goes into a special slack channel and we all try to take the time to read other’s updates to help with blockers and stuff. Just a small sentence for each section. It’s works nicely but we also are super small. I prefer it to spending a 15 or more minutes on a video call listening to two people talk while everyone else ignores them. If we need to chat on video we self organize.

I have done that a few times and I feel the value drops to almost zero, or in some instances even negative, by doing this.

Standups should be short hence do them standing with no digital screens around and team-size is optimally ~5. 30-60 secs per person probably. Writing a line on Slack spreads them out and takes away more focus IMHO.

Many people will just ignore what is written in the Slack channel and you lose the advantage that everyone knows what is going on and can give feedback. Instant helping out or course correct does not happen.

You lose the team feeling a sense of the team making progress, it easily becomes each dev for themselves.

It often devolves into ticking a box and keeping up the appearance that you are on track, instead of quickly catching those potential situations. I have seen devs then get into terrible psychological pressure since they have over-reported in a way that is much harder in a real standup.

If you need to focus more I would prefer to just drop the daily standup completely once or twice a week.

Yes, I work at a asynchronous first dev shop. This is all we do and it works alright.

The underlying prerequisite here is that you need to have a strong reading culture on your team.

I did, it worked beautifully but got Shot down by the Scrum Master :/.