slack-message vs tweet-thread
Topic: Should we adopt async-first standups?
Axis varied: format
A: Slack Message B: Tweet Thread
What to notice
Section titled “What to notice”Both are short and numbered-ish and informal, and the stakes are not remotely the same.
A is private team communication. It names the India team’s situation directly because everyone reading has context and standing.
B is public broadcast, retrospective, and quotable: “1/ We killed our daily standup six months ago. 11 engineers, 4 timezones. Here is what happened, and what I would tell another EM thinking about it.”
The tell: B has to explain its own team to strangers and is addressed to other EMs rather than to colleagues. Post A publicly and it reads as airing something internal.
A: slack-message
Proposal: try async standups for 30 days starting May 19
Our 9am standup is hard on the India team and the info disappears after each call. Want to run an experiment:
- Each person posts to #team-standup by 10am local time (3 fields: shipped / in progress / blocked)
- Blocked items @mention the person who can unblock
- On-call reads the channel by 9am PT and responds to blocks within 30 min
- We keep Thursday 3pm as a real working session for anything that needs live discussion
@priya @arjun @deepa - this gets you out of 9:30pm standups. Want to hear your reaction first.
:thread: Drop thoughts in thread by Friday and I will send a final plan Monday.
B: tweet-thread
1/ We killed our daily standup six months ago. 11 engineers, 4 timezones. Here is what happened, and what I would tell another EM thinking about it.
2/ The math that broke us: 9am Pacific standup = 9:30pm IST. Our India team attended 3.2 out of 5 days. Our US team showed up 4.6. We were running two different teams pretending to be one.
3/ The 14-minute meeting produced about 4 minutes of signal. The rest was round-robin throat-clearing. And none of it persisted. By Wednesday, nobody remembered what Monday’s standup covered.
4/ The replacement: post in #team-standup before 10am local. Three fields. Shipped. In progress. Blocked or at risk. If you are blocked, @mention the person who can unblock. That is the entire ritual.
5/ The sync time did not disappear. We banked it into one 60-minute Thursday working session. Real decisions, real design conversations. If there is no agenda by Wednesday, we cancel.
6/ Week 2 numbers: 47/55 posts on time. Median blocker resolution: 18 minutes. India engineers contributed every weekday for the first time ever. Five person-hours per week recovered, net of the Thursday slot.
7/ The thing nobody warns you about: writing is harder than talking. Engineers who breezed through sync standups struggled with the post. That is a feature, not a bug. The async post forces clarity.
8/ What I got wrong: I underestimated the on-call triage load. Reading 11 posts and routing blockers takes 25 minutes some mornings. We are watching whether to rotate this faster.
9/ If you try this: do not half-async it. A daily call plus an async post is just more work. Pick one. We picked async, with a single weekly synchronous slot held for the things async cannot do.
10/ The hardest part is not the process. It is convincing senior leadership that an engineering team without a daily standup is still a team. Show them the blocker resolution times. The data does the arguing.