Standup Alice Blog

Pick a time for your daily standup and you've made a choice you probably didn't mean to make. You've decided whose day it fits and whose day it interrupts. On a team in one office, that choice is invisible. On a distributed team, it's the whole problem. The math nobody runs Say your team spans San Francisco, Berlin, and Bangalore. A 9 a.m. standup in San Francisco is 6 p.m. in Berlin and 9:30 p.m. in Bangalore. Your Berlin engineer is closing her laptop. Your Bangalore lead i

Think about someone's first two weeks on your team. They arrive with roughly forty questions. Who owns the deploy pipeline. Why that project got paused in June. Who to talk to about the billing service. What the team decided about the migration, and more importantly, why. Onboarding remote team members breaks down in that gap. It breaks down because the answers to most of those questions were never written anywhere. They were said out loud, in a meeting, eight months ago. Eve

Open your team's Slack right now. Green dots everywhere. Someone posted a GIF in general twenty minutes ago. On paper, everything looks fine. Now answer this honestly: do you actually know what everyone on your team did yesterday? If you hesitated, you just found the real problem. Not a lack of activity. A lack of signal. The Green Dot Lie Being online is not the same as being known. A green dot tells you someone opened their laptop. It does not tell you what they are working

There's a weird assumption floating around that remote teams are naturally less productive. Meanwhile, most office workers have sat through at least one meeting that absolutely could have been an email instead. The truth is, remote work usually isn't the problem. Poor communication is. Distance Doesn't Create Confusion. Unclear Workflows Do. Remote teams thrive when the basics are in place, and they struggle fast when those basics go missing. Here's the difference: Remote tea