Every time someone questions the daily standup, the same answer comes back:
“It’s just fifteen minutes.”
I’ve heard it from managers, from engineers, from myself.
And I get why it sounds reasonable.
Fifteen minutes feels harmless. It feels too small to fight over.
But that sentence hides a trick. It compresses a real cost into a number that feels emotionally negligible.
Let’s slow it down. Not philosophically. Just numerically.
Say you have eight engineers in a standup. Nothing exotic. Pretty normal.
Fifteen minutes each means two engineering hours per day. Not “time”. Engineering hours.
If you’re in the US, Europe, or anywhere paying market rates, a fully loaded hour is easily $100–$130.
Let’s be conservative and say $120.
That’s roughly $240 per day. About $1,200 per week. A bit over $60k per year.
For a meeting no one would ever approve if it showed up as a line item. And that’s before we talk about what actually happens in the standup.
Because here’s the uncomfortable part:
most standups aren’t fifteen minutes of coordination.
They’re fifteen minutes of narration. One person talks about something that matters to them. Seven others wait.
Then the next person does the same.
By the end, everyone has spoken, which creates the feeling of alignment. But very little has actually changed.
No decision. No risk resolved. No dependency unblocked. Just confirmation that people are, in fact, working.
This is where teams quietly lose a lot of money.
Not because standups are evil. But because a large chunk of that time produces no signal for most of the room.
Call it waste. Call it overhead. Call it “the price of alignment”.
Whatever word you choose, it exists.
Even if you assume only 30–40% of the standup is low-value (which is generous), you’re still talking about tens of thousands of dollars per team, per year.
And almost nobody ever writes that number down.
Why?
Because numbers make things awkward.
Saying “standups feel inefficient” is safe. Saying “this meeting costs us ~$25k a year in low-signal time” is not.
Numbers force a real question:
Is this still worth it?
And once you ask that, you can’t hide behind tradition anymore.
To be clear: this isn’t an argument to kill standups.
Some teams genuinely need them. Some phases benefit from daily sync. Some problems are worth paying for.
The issue isn’t the meeting. It’s the lack of intentionality.
Standups tend to stick around long after their value drops, simply because no one ever re-runs the math.
At some point, I got tired of hand-waving this discussion.
So I built a small calculator that does the boring part:
team size, meeting length, rough salary assumptions, and a realistic waste factor.
It doesn’t tell you what to do. It just shows the number.
No signup. No email. No pitch.
If you want to see what the “just fifteen minutes” argument actually costs in your context, you can run it here:
Use it to think. Not to blame people.
The uncomfortable truth is this:
Most standups don’t fail because they’re useless.
They fail because their cost becomes invisible.
And once a ritual becomes invisible, it stops being questioned.
That’s how “just fifteen minutes” turns into a tax nobody remembers approving.
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