Standups for all

Your C-levels need to be doing standup too

You’re reading Playbooks & Priorities, a newsletter about working, parenting, and working parenthood.

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At my first job, we had a company-wide standup every day, and we all fit into one Google Meet. It was chaotic but beautiful—engineers, designers, marketers, and yes, managers, all sharing what they were working on that day. There was something powerful about that transparency, that shared rhythm to our work.

However, as companies scale, standups typically retreat to the domain of product & engineering teams. Managers and executives gradually exempt themselves from this basic practice, considering it beneath their pay grade or irrelevant to their "strategic" work. This evolution, while understandable, represents a significant and often overlooked loss of accountability, intentionality, and productivity.

The Accountability Asymmetry

It's one of the great ironies of organizational life: those with the most autonomy over their time typically have the least structured accountability for how they spend it. Engineers, whose work is often the most directly measurable, submit to daily scrutiny of their tasks. Meanwhile, managers—whose impact is diffuse and whose time allocation directly affects entire teams—operate with minimal day-to-day oversight.

This asymmetry creates a bizarre incentive structure. The people with the least power have the most accountability. At the same time, those with significant organizational influence can go days or weeks without a clear articulation of how their time connects to company priorities.

The Strategic-Tactical Fallacy

The most common objection to manager standups is what I call the Strategic-Tactical Fallacy: the belief that strategic work cannot be meaningfully broken down into daily tasks.

"Come up with new channel strategy" is indeed not something you can add to a daily to-do list and check off by 5 PM. But this isn't a valid argument against standups—it's precisely why managers need them more than anyone else.

Strategic work doesn't happen through osmosis or pure contemplation. It happens through a series of discrete actions: researching competitor approaches, interviewing customers, drafting analysis documents, modeling financial scenarios, meeting with stakeholders, and creating presentation decks. These are all concrete, articulate-able tasks that can be part of a daily standup.

A manager or senior team member who cannot break down strategic initiatives into tactical components doesn't have a standup problem—they have an execution problem.

The Reactive Manager Trap

Many middle managers find themselves trapped in reactive mode, responding to emails, attending meetings, and fielding requests from direct reports. This isn't inherently bad—responsiveness is part of the job. But when reactivity consumes entire days, managers become glorified coordinators rather than strategic drivers.

If you've ever looked up at 6 PM wondering where your day went, you've fallen into the Reactive Manager Trap. Your day got consumed by other people's priorities, not your intentional work advancing organizational goals.

This is precisely where standups become invaluable. The practice of articulating "Here's what I'm going to accomplish today" creates a commitment mechanism, a mental anchor against the tide of reactivity. The simple act of writing down your intended accomplishments dramatically increases the likelihood that you'll carve out time for them amid the chaos.

Standups as Strategic-to-Tactical Translation

What makes manager standups particularly powerful is that they force the translation of strategic initiatives into concrete next actions. This translation is a core competency of effective management, not a distraction from it.

Consider a VP of Sales working on that new channel strategy:

• Poor standup: "Working on channel strategy again today."

• Effective standup: "Today, I'm analyzing conversion rates from our last three channel experiments to identify patterns, then drafting the competitive landscape section of the channel strategy document."

• Best standup:

  • Analyze conversion rates from the last 3 channel experiments

  • Draft competitive landscape section of channel strategy doc

The difference is stark. The first provides no accountability and no clarity on progress. The second demonstrates that the manager has broken down the strategic work into meaningful components and has a clear plan for moving forward today. The third recognizes that standup is a commitment and productivity tool, not a CYA activity or a justification document.

This granularity serves multiple purposes:

1. It creates clear metrics for daily accomplishment

2. It forces the manager to think concretely about advancing strategic work

3. It provides visibility to the team about where leadership's focus lies

4. It models good planning practices for direct reports

Real-world Applications

In my current role at Settle, the product team has a #product-standup channel where we post our standups every day. And, yes, this includes our SVP of Product. Every single day. Separately, the pod that I PM also does a daily standup.

One CEO I previously consulted for kept a public Notion document outlining weekly priorities and daily tasks toward those priorities. This transparency allowed his team to understand how his time connected to broader initiatives and created a natural alignment between his focus and the team's objectives.

A PM that I work with meets with his team four days per week to do a live sync standup where they review their Kanban board together. This keeps their iterative feedback loops tight, minimizes the amount of thrash the team experiences as priorities shift because priorities are always kept small, and eliminates invisible work, as everything (except hiring activities) is captured on their board.

Formats That Work for Management

Manager standups need not mirror engineering standups perfectly. The format should match the nature of the work:

• Written vs. Verbal: Written standups often work better for managers, as they create a record of commitments and accomplishments that can be referenced later.

• Timeframes: While daily granularity remains important, managers benefit from nesting these within weekly and monthly views to maintain a connection to longer-term objectives.

• Public vs. Private: There's significant value in making manager standups visible to direct reports. This creates natural accountability and demonstrates that everyone, regardless of level, commits to specific work.

• Integration with Strategic Documents: The best manager standups directly reference components of strategic plans, OKRs, or company objectives, making the connection between daily work and broader goals explicit.

The Delegation Dilemma

One legitimate challenge for managers implementing standups is the delegation factor. Much of a manager's job involves delegating work rather than doing it directly. This creates a potential "empty standup" problem where managers struggle to articulate their direct contributions.

However, this challenge reveals precisely why standups are valuable—they force managers to confront whether they're adding value beyond coordination. Effective managers should always have concrete tasks advancing initiatives beyond what they've delegated: providing feedback on work products, removing obstacles, synthesizing information, making decisions, or creating frameworks.

If a manager truly struggles to articulate their direct contributions in standup, it may indicate they've delegated execution but not defined their value-add.

Accountability Without Micromanagement

Some managers resist standups because they fear creating a culture of micromanagement. This misunderstands the purpose of the practice. Standups aren't about controlling how people work—they're about creating clarity and alignment around what people are working on.

For managers, standups reduce the need for micromanagement by making progress visible without requiring constant check-ins. They create organic accountability rather than imposed control.

Getting Started

If you're a manager considering implementing standups, start simple:

1. Create a Slack channel and write a message with 3 bullet points:

   1. What you accomplished yesterday

   2. What you commit to accomplishing today

   3. Any blockers or support needed

2. Share this with your direct reports, your leadership, or your peer group

3. Stick with it for at least two weeks before evaluating

4. Focus on tasks that advance strategic initiatives, not just meetings attended

The first few days will feel uncomfortable as you translate ambiguous work into concrete tasks. This discomfort is the value—it forces clarity about how you're spending your scarcest resource: your time.

The Manager Who Couldn't Stand Up

The ultimate test of effective management is whether you can articulate your contribution. If you can't explain what you're doing today to advance the organization's goals, how can you be sure you're spending your time effectively?

The manager who claims their work "doesn't fit into a standup format" is essentially saying they can't translate strategy into action—a fundamental management skill. The manager who spends days without clear accomplishments isn't engaged in "big picture thinking"—they're failing to drive meaningful progress.

Standups aren't just for engineers. They're for anyone who cares about intentional work, demonstrable progress, and accountability to commitments. They're particularly valuable for those whose scope is broad and whose time is most likely to be consumed by reactivity.

The next time you find yourself wondering where your day went, ask whether a daily standup practice might be the accountability mechanism you need. Your team—who likely already participate in standups themselves—will appreciate the symmetry of seeing leadership subject to the same standards of clarity and commitment they're expected to uphold.

The most effective leaders know that accountability doesn't diminish with seniority—it intensifies. Standups are simply one practical tool for honoring that reality.

Bonus: A Wrap-Up Mechanism

How I wrap up my day with Standup - Watch Video

Something I have learned about myself is that the morning is my best time to get shit done. If I need to do hard things or really dig into a difficult problem, I need to do it before 10 AM. This isn’t always possible, and sometimes I have to do hard things at 2:30 PM, but my best work is done in the peak morning hours before most of my colleagues are even online.

Writing a standup- because of the work required to break down hard, ambitious, ambiguous tasks into tactical action steps- can be mentally taxing, so I write my standup the day before. As I’m wrapping up my work day, I will take a look at the standup I posted in the morning, cross out what I got done from my list for the day, note what my schedule for the next day looks like, and plan any tasks for me to take on.

This works because it frees me, mentally, of the work I didn’t get to (it’s not on today’s list anymore; it’s tomorrow’s problem) and because it forces me to articulate what I need to do tomorrow.

Do you have a standup practice?