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Alternatives to daily standups are no longer a niche interest. To prove this, Google “alternatives to daily standup Reddit.” You’d see a long list of posts questioning their frequency, asking for alternatives, and advocating their removal.
Honestly, it’s not surprising. Survey after survey shows that most workers say meetings are unproductive and stop them from getting work done. To make it worse, most teams still run their standups using the outdated “What did I do yesterday? / What will I do today? / Any blockers?” script. This has long been removed from the 2020 Scrum Guide and refocused the Daily Scrum on inspecting progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapting plans for the next 24 hours.
If your daily scrum feels like an unproductive status report instead of a collaborative meeting, keep reading. You’d find seven alternatives to daily standups that keep your team aligned and moving forward without dragging everyone into unnecessary meetings.
What are The Three Core Functions Standups Should Serve?
Before we discuss alternatives, it’s best to first understand what effective standups should accomplish. According to the scrum guide, the purpose of a daily standup is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adjust plans for the next 24 hours. This understanding ensures that, regardless of the alternative you choose, you are still able to accomplish the purpose of this daily meeting.
- Reporting: Your daily standup should communicate progress, plans, and risks in a way stakeholders can access without multiple follow-ups.
- Bonding: It should sustain team trust and connection, especially when you have a distributed team with different working styles.
- Planning Function: Finally, it should help you identify blockers early, align on priorities, and make decisions efficiently before small issues become big problems. I love this short article on how a team changed their approach to their standup and still got better results.
Alternatives to Daily Stand‑Ups: 7 Asynchronous Options to Replace Your Daily Scrum
If your survey a hundred teams, 80% of them would say daily standups are more of a nuisiance than helpful. Meetings generally don't have the best of reputations. According to a HBR survey, 71% of managers and employees see them as a waste of time. 65% of people say that it stops them from completing their work. Daily scrum is part of these meetings. According to the 2020 Scrum guide, It's goal is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog. Fortunately, having meetings every day is not the only way to achieve this. Here are seven daily standup alternatives that keep alignment while removing unnecessary meetings.
1. Asynchronous Slack/Teams Bots: Tools like Geekbot, Standuply, DailyBot, or Polly give you a way to make progress on your sprint goals without a daily meeting. Instead of having everyone join a call, these bots send a set of prompts at a scheduled time and collect responses in a shared channel. Updates are threaded, so follow‑up questions stay in one place, and everything is searchable later.
How it works: You’re probably familiar with Geekbot or its alternatives. If you aren’t , you start by adding your team members and configuring your standup questions. The bot DMs your team members at a stipulated time and forwards their responses to a dedicated Slack or Teams Channel.
One of the big advantages is that asynchronous stand‑ups scale easily across teams and locations. The updates persist, so it’s easy to scroll back, add links, or reply in a thread. Because people can post when they start work, they no longer have to wait for a scheduled meeting. This reduces context switching and gives them more time to focus.
Why it works: Async bots work well because they remove the scheduling conflicts and time zone issues that come with synchronous standups. For dev teams, it also means that you don’t pull people out of focused work to attend a status update meeting that may run over time.
2. Weekly Written Snippets: Instead of daily updates, you can share comprehensive weekly summaries that provide broader context and reduce update frequency. It’s another way you can stay aligned without interruptions. If you’re part of a team that values documentation, this approach can work well for you.
How it works: Each Friday (or any other day you choose), every member of your team writes a short update that covers what they achieved, their priorities for the coming week, any blockers, and key decisions. The summary might also include a “wins and challenges” section. You can push these updates into a Slack or Teams channel, a Confluence/Notion page, so they’re visible and searchable by everyone.
Why it works: Weekly snippets are best if you’re bullish about deep work but still want to preserve alignment. This approach is fantastic because it forces your team to stop and reflect. For managers and other stakeholders, it gives you a summary that covers several days of work, making trends and blockers more visible than in a daily update. Key takeaway: Weekly written updates improve visibility and encourage reflection without daily disruption.
Some Frequent Questions Around Weekly Async Updates:
- Do we wait until the end of the week to share our updates?: A weekly snippet doesn't pause day-to-day communication until a specified time or the end of the week. It works best when you already have good visibility into day‑to‑day progress through your project management tool or team chat, and when your work doesn’t change dramatically from one day to the next.
Use your work communication tools for daily updates and to flag important issues. Don’t wait an entire week to share important information. Continue these discussions on Slack or any work communication tool you use.
- What type of teams will benefit more from weekly async updates? The teams that will benefit more from weekly async updates are those with lower interdependence. It will also work well for those who already have a strong asynchronous culture. If your team uses a Kanban or Scrum board effectively, and if you raise blockers quickly in chat, a weekly written update serves as a higher‑level check‑in rather than the primary means of unblocking work.
3. Project Management Tool Updates: Another method you could try is posting your updates directly on your project management software.
How it works: Ensure that each card or work item in Jira or your project management software is detailed. It should clearly explain what the task is about. Then agree on when everyone will share their updates; At the start of the day? or at the end of the day. To ensure nobody misses this, you can set up a Zap or use an automation that sends reminders to everyone at the specified time.
Remember that this goes beyond updating your board. Encourage your team to use the comments feature to provide more context instead of Slack. If you collaborate more with external stakeholders and want to provide a workspace for updates that’s tied to respective work items, then you’d want to learn more about Quely. It gives your team, cross-functional teams, and external teams one place to have conversations about your work. You can take a product tour here.
Finally, remember to add watchers to the board so that the relevant stakeholders are notified of progress. Assign someone to own this so that they can ensure other team members are following through and also escalate blockers to the relevant parties. Always review your board consistently. If you don’t, people will stop participating, and your board will quickly become obsolete.
Why it works: This approach would work well if you are keen on preserving context. The tasks, the updates, and all communication around the task are tied directly to the ticket. You already know that in Slack, it’s easy for messages to be buried. If you want to have a single source of truth, then this approach will suit your team
4. Video Asynchronous Updates: Video updates might not work well for every team. This approach is best if you want to make your standups flexible while still retaining some personal touch that async standups, which is mostly text lack. Even at that, a video might not be the best option every time. If you’re focused on quick alignment, then text updates work just fine. But if you want to provide more context or share updates about tasks that are hard to explain in writing (e.g., design revisions, code refactoring, architecture changes), then video is ideal.
Something else to watch out for is to ensure that the video is not an overkill, is to limit the cadence. Atlassian design team shares how they limit standup to once a week using async video check-in. Each person on their design team records a brief, 1-3-minute Loom with the highlights of what they’re working on that week.
How it Works: Again, remember to set a cadence. eg, do you meet once a week and have every other person send their updates on Friday via video? Also, to ensure that every video does not contain unnecessary information, you have to share a video presentation format. What should each video say and in what format?. Finally, add the video links to the relevant work items or to any centralized platform for easy reference.
5. Reduced Frequency Synchronous Meetings: This is similar to all other approaches we’ve discussed so far. What’s different is the frequency. Instead of providing an async update via Slack or on your project management, your team has one synchronous meeting every week.
How it works: When you adopt this method, your team updates their kanban board or provides async updates at the required time. Then, once a week, schedule a longer sync where you review progress and make decisions. To ensure this stays a topic, create an agenda and share beforehand. Loom does something similar. They send an agenda via video beforehand. When they meet, their meeting is more focused and meeting .
Why it works: A GitLab report shows that most engineering teams are split across three time zones. We know that most remote workers complain that daily standup break their concentration. So having a single meeting each week solves this problem.
Synchronous meetings work best if:
- Your team is more familiar with async work. If your team already keeps the backlog and board up to date and addresses blockers in Slack, you can safely reduce meeting frequency.
- You run projects with moderate change and interdependence . Weekly or bi‑weekly standups suit teams whose tasks don’t change dramatically day to day. Highly interdependent teams or fast‑moving projects may still benefit from shorter daily syncs.
- Your team is distributed. For teams spread across multiple time zones, a daily meeting may be impossible to schedule without someone logging in at odd hours. Weekly meetings give you more flexibility and can be rotated to suit everyone.
Moving from daily standups to weekly or bi‑weekly synchronous meetings is a big change. Here are the answers to some of the questions you may have.
- How will we stay aligned between meetings?: Reducing your meeting frequency will work if you combine it with async updates. This means you have to update your project boards judiciously or use tools like Quely to share your updates.
- What if something important comes up before the meeting? You don’t have to wait until your meetings to address blockers. At Quely, we set up a Quely session for important but not urgent tasks or conversations we need to have before the meeting. But for important and urgent tasks, we schedule a quick call or huddle in Slack.
- Won’t a weekly or bi-weekly meeting run over time? Honestly, it can. That’s why we advise that you create an agenda beforehand and share it with everyone. You can use Quely for this. It lets you convert your Jira work items into meeting agendas so that your meetings are tied to your work.
- Is this approach right for every team? Bi-weekly or weekly synchronous meetings are best for high-agency teams that already have transparency through their project board. If your team is making the transition to async work, this approach might not work for you just yet.
6. Dedicated Decision-Making Sessions: Standups are for status updates. But a lot of times, they quickly devolve into decision-making meetings. If you notice that half of your standup is spent deciding if you should add a last‑minute feature request to the current sprint (or any other scope trade‑off), then it’s a sign that you need a different meeting for decision-making.
How it works: For this to work, you have to be intentional about keeping this meeting purely for decision-making. Share updates in another designated place. For us at Quely, we use Quely sessions to plan our sprint. We post all our updates directly in the Sprint session in Quely. That way, all updates and conversations about each task are tied to the specific work item. When we see a decision that we can’t reach async, we schedule a meeting directly from our platform, switching seamlessly from async to real-time sync.
You don’t have to invite everyone to your decision-making meeting. Only bring in those who have enough context and authority to make a call. This ensures that you don’t pull people away from their week into a meeting they have no say in. If you’re unsure of who to invite, use the DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) to clarify roles.
Why this works: This approach would work well if you’re easing into async standup, like meeting twice a week and moving the rest of the standup async. Decision meetings will help you keep your standups short and focused, while still having time to give complex issues adequate attention.
Why Should You Try Decision Making Meetings? It’s not advisable to debate decisions off‑the‑cuff in a standup. Instead have a dedicated session where you spend 30–60 minutes evaluating data, weighing trade‑offs and agreeing on a plan. This leads to better decision making and outcomes.
7. Optional Social Connection Time: If you’re worried about losing the connection that comes from synchronous meetings, then you might want to try an optional social connection. It is a meeting or space focused on encouraging your team to learn about each other, increase engagement, and team bonding without reintroducing the distractions that frequent meetings bring.
How it works: Remember, this is optional and quite different from your updates. You might devote Mondays and Fridays to synchronous check-ins, Tuesdays and Thursdays to synchronous check-ins, and reserve Wednesdays for team connection. You can have team members take turns hosting a 15-minute chat about anything they wish. Alternatively, it can be virtual coffee chats where team members drop in to chat about non-work-related stuff.
Why it Works: Optional social connections are powerful because they help people who work together to learn more about each other. It is also a way to balance out async work with occasional face time.
Answers to Common Questions (FAQ)
- Why eliminate the three classic daily standup questions?
The 2020 Scrum Guide removed the standard “What did I do yesterday/What will I do today/Any blockers?” format because the Daily Scrum should focus on inspecting progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapting the Sprint Backlog - Are meetings really that bad?
According to a Harvard Business Review survey of senior managers, 71 % believe meetings are unproductive and 65 % say meetings prevent them from completing their work. Adopting async updates can help teams reclaim deep‑work time. - Can we mix multiple alternatives?
Yes. Many teams combine weekly async updates with occasional synchronous sessions and optional social time. Treat these alternatives as tools you can mix and match. - Do weekly or bi‑weekly standups still require prep?
Yes. For reduced‑frequency standups to work, team members must keep project boards up to date and share blockers asynchronously. Use automation or bots to remind people to post updates.
Conclusion
When you reach your 10th or 100th standup, you’d notice something. It’s moved from its original goal and has become this ritual where people recite their status updates. The problem is not your standup. It’s the way you’re conducting it.
The alternatives we’ve shared are not prescriptions. There is no universal “best” format; instead, think of them as a toolbox. Mix and match asynchronous updates, weekly check‑ins, decision‑making sessions, and social time to suit your team’s size, time zones, and work style. Start small, gather feedback, and iterate—just as you would with any agile process. By experimenting and adapting rather than adopting a single method, you’ll build a rhythm that keeps your team aligned and energized, regardless of the standup format you eventually choose.
FURTHER READING: CASE STUDIES ON HOW 3 TEAMS MOVED THEIR STANDUPS ASYNC WITHOUT LOSING ALIGNMENT
Not Only Code – Traded daily meetings for Slack messages: Gregory Witek started his article with “I tried improving stand-ups in 3 different companies. Here's how it went and why I believe async stand-up is a good idea”. He started with the typical challenges: a standup that took too long and another that alienated team members in a different location. He shared how they removed standup, turned to async updates and saved about 3 hours a week.
Bidnamic – Moved from stand‑up to “Engineering Labs”: Sanjay Hallan, head of engineering, shared how, for two years, they followed the typical daily standup script. After some time, he realized that it wasn’t working for them. “They weren’t aiding any sort of meaningful collaboration between us, certainly not at the level required when working on highly complex problems in a data-driven engineering team. Topics remained at the surface level as there was no structured way to delve deeper and see them through. …, but that just didn’t cut it for us: we needed meaningful and enriching.” He shared how they switched from daily scrum to what he called engineering labs, how they implemented it, and the benefits.
Zapier –Moved to Slack bot: Zapier replaced their standups with a meeting bot. They admitted that the typical standup format works well in theory. But it's easy to quickly grow numb to the same questions repeated over and over (and over) and miss patterns that should be addressed. So they switched to Geekbot and also shared how it’s worked and its shortcomings.