Warning: I thought daily standup meetings were a waste of time for 3 years

For the longest time I was totally against daily standup meetings with clients. I figured they were just another way to eat up billable hours with chit chat. But last year I took on a big project with a retail chain in Denver and the owner asked for a 10 minute check-in every morning. I agreed just to keep them happy. After about 2 weeks I noticed we caught small misunderstandings before they turned into big problems. Like one time the designer and I were on totally different pages about the color scheme for their new website and we fixed it in 2 minutes instead of redoing a whole mockup. Now I do quick standups with most of my regular clients and it honestly saves me a couple hours of email back and forth each week. Has anyone else come around on something they used to hate?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_daniel1d agoMost Upvoted

Kill me now, another meeting to start my day.

charlieh741d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah, that minimal homepage story is spot on. Feels like half the frustration in life comes from people having two completely different pictures in their heads and nobody thinking to compare them until it's too late.

mason.drew1d ago

That part about catching misunderstandings early really hit home. My buddy runs a small web dev shop and he told me they had a client who wanted a "minimal" homepage and the dev took that to mean pure white with nothing on it. A quick 5 minute standup the next morning saved them from wasting a week building something nobody wanted.