Standup Alice Blog

A daily standup is supposed to take fifteen minutes. Ask any developer how it actually feels, and you will hear a different story. Somehow a fifteen minute meeting can wreck an entire morning of coding. That feeling is not just in their heads. Scientists have studied it. The numbers explain a lot about why standups can feel so much bigger than the time on the clock. What a Meeting Really Does to a Developer's Brain When you are deep in code, you are holding a lot of things in

Yesterday. Today. Blockers. If your team has run a standup for more than a month, you could probably answer all three in your sleep, which is sort of the problem. The questions stopped asking anything. They just collect a status report nobody reads twice. Good daily standup questions do more than that. They surface the blocker someone was about to bury. They catch the decision nobody agreed on. Once in a while, they even make the standup a little fun. Here are 20 worth steali

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

Alice does not drink coffee. She does not scroll Slack on her lunch break. But by 9 a.m. on most days, she probably knows more about what your team accomplished yesterday than you do. Standup Alice is a bot, obviously. But the easiest way to actually understand how Standup Alice works is not a features list. It is following her through one ordinary Tuesday. So here it is, hour by hour: 7:00 AM: Alice Wakes Up Before You Do Before anyone has opened their laptop, Alice has alre

Every team has two versions of the same Monday morning standup. The boss's version starts with a familiar question: did anyone actually do the thing we talked about last week? The employee's version starts with a slightly different one: do I really have to say, out loud, in front of six people, that I am still working on the thing I said I was working on yesterday? Same meeting. Two completely different headaches. And somehow, everyone still shows up. The Boss's Side: "Did An