How We Run Engineering Without Sprints, Standups, or Story Points

We didn’t set out to eliminate standups. We set out to eliminate wasted time, and standups were the clearest example of it we had. Fifteen engineers, fifteen minutes each morning — that’s nearly four engineer-hours per day of synchronous time spent on status updates that could be read asynchronously in three minutes.

What We Use Instead

Daily written updates, asynchronously. Each engineer writes two to three sentences: what they shipped yesterday, what they’re working on today, anything blocking them. Takes five minutes to write, takes three minutes to read the whole team’s updates. Net time saved: 60%.

Replacing Sprints With Shape Up

We run six-week cycles with two-week cooldowns, loosely inspired by Basecamp’s Shape Up methodology. Work is shaped and approved before any engineer touches it. This eliminates the mid-sprint scope creep and the sprint review theater that consumed hours of engineering time every two weeks.

The Result

We shipped more in the first two quarters of this system than in the previous two quarters of traditional scrum. More importantly, engineers reported higher satisfaction and less cognitive overhead. Process should serve the work, not consume it.