The standup had been fifteen minutes when the team was four people. At eleven people it was forty-five, and by the time the last person spoke the first had forgotten what they said.
Meetings scale badly for the same reason distributed systems do: coordination cost grows faster than headcount. Nobody notices because the cost is paid in fragments of attention rather than in a line item.
A meeting without a decider is a status report performed live at enormous cost.
We split into two async written updates and one weekly decision meeting with an actual agenda and an actual decider. Engineering hours recovered: roughly nine per week, per team.
Async by default. Synchronous when a decision needs a human in the loop.
The teams that resisted hardest were the ones who used standup as their only social contact. That's a real need — we solved it with a Friday coffee call instead of a daily status ritual.
