Daily standups have long been pretty popular in team management for their ability to improve communication and effectiveness. Some studies suggest that effective daily standups can improve team cohesion by up to 50% and remove blockers to progress (check: Atlassian Agile Coach)
However, early morning meetups / meetings (even 15mins) can be more disruptive than beneficial for some team members. Opinions on productivity and time of day are far from unanimous. While a good number of studies—and even some urban legends—swear that mornings are peak productivity hours, that's not the full story. Some neuroscientists, like those featured on the Huberman Lab channel, offer a different perspective. They argue that mornings are best suited for tactical, focused tasks, whereas evenings could be more conducive to creative thinking and problem-solving. So, when it comes to productivity, it turns out the "best" time of day might just depend on the type of work you're doing.
So, with a hypothesis of early standup meetings might actually be counterproductive for product / tech people we decided to explore different options. Another metric nudging us in this direction was the so called "mood" factor. Newer generations tend to “hate” mornings more and more and given that the majority of instacar’s tech / product team are pretty young, this backed up our hypothesis. With these considerations in mind, we decided to experiment with Geekbot, aiming to retain the benefits of daily standups, while ditching some of their downsides.
Geekbot, basically takes the standup concept and makes it asynchronous and text-based. It works through Slack and each morning asks us to answer two key questions:
- What project are you working on today?
- Do you have any blockers?
Data-wise, blockers are down by ~20%, within the 1st month of switching to Geekbot. Hopefully, Linear task management tool, provides some clean dashboards to keep track of team’s progress. Also, all these standup notes are saved, so I can easily review them within Geekbot reports tab at my own pace. I get a real-time look at what's happening, without having to intrude on anyone's workflow.
In a nutshell, Geekbot hasn’t just replaced our daily standups—it’s elevated them. Our team is getting progressively more effective and our mornings? They're just better.
PS. I am the current king 😂 of report streaks (de-throning Kyriakos from a concecutive 33 reports)