E155: Why Game Teams Hate Daily Standups (And When They Work)
Show notes
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Are you running the three standup questions every morning, only to find your team sitting through 15 minutes of status updates that nobody is listening to?
Most game dev standups run 15 minutes or more, and it isn't because the team talks too much. It's the format. Everyone goes around the room answering what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and whether they're blocked, and the only person really listening is the one collecting the answers. No wonder teams keep asking to cut the standup back, move it to Slack, or drop it entirely.
Ben breaks down the standup he runs instead. It starts with an engineering team that had given up on daily standups and swore they collaborated just fine without them. After two weeks of their way, Ben asked for two weeks of his. The first standup took eight minutes, and someone asked, "Was that a standup?" The difference: the team stops reporting to one person and starts walking the board together, priority one first, asking how to get the most important work done.
What you'll learn in this episode:
- Why the three standup questions turn a team meeting into a one-person status report
- What a standup is actually for, and why Ben runs it as an alignment meeting
- How to walk the board by priority instead of going around the room person by person
- Why the product owner and every lead belong in the room, and what it signals when they're kept out
- Why finishing your top three priorities beats getting six things to 50%
- Why Ben doesn't assign priorities to individuals, and how a name on a task punishes people for helping
- When a group of people doesn't need a daily standup at all
- How to answer a team that tells you standups don't work
If you're a leader in game dev whose team dreads the daily standup or keeps asking to cancel it, this episode is for you.
Connect with us:
🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/
🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/
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🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg
🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@buildingbettergames
If you want help leading teams and studios to better games players love, you can reach me at: [email protected]
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