Daily Huddles

Daily huddles are a short, daily coordination ritual.  Huddles are narrowly about keeping work moving.   This means ensuring priorities, commitments, blockers and objectives are visible every day.  If your team is shipping, selling, supporting, or delivering—huddles are the fastest way to surface friction before it turns into missed deadlines, surprise escalations, or endless side meetings.

What a huddle is

• A huddle is:
  • A tight loop for “here’s what’s happening, here’s what’s next, here’s what’s stuck.”
  • A daily (or near-daily) inspection of progress and impediments.
  • A coordination mechanism
• A huddle is not:
  • A long status meeting where we talk about things outside of the scope of immediate work
  • A strategy session where we try to figure out complicated tricky issues
  • A manager grilling session
  • An employee grilling session
  • A problem-solving workshop (that happens *after* with the right people).

If you’re debating designs, diagnosing a production incident, or negotiating priorities live in the huddle, you’ve already lost.   You want to capture those items and push to the correct meeting for them.

Why we love huddles

As you grow coordination debt grows.   You'll also hear this called misalignment.  All that is just the hidden cost of not having people be on the same page about any given item.   Early on you can sometimes just power through it and figure it out.  Later, though, it becomes gnarly and impossible.  Huddles are the cheapest, easiest coordination layer you can add—and they scale with any organization of any size.   While it's not the exact model here's a quick example of how you can scale up:

• Small team (0–10 people)
  • One team huddle
  • Cadence: daily
  • Outcome: everyone knows today’s focus and what’s blocked.
• Now we have departments (10–100)
  • Team huddles occur daily in line with small team huddle
  • Cross team or leadership team huddle three times a week handles issues that roll-up from teams
  • Outcome: Daily resolution of team level issues, cross company issues addressed on average in one day at worst in two days
• Now we have multiple levels in departments(100+)
  • Team huddles occur daily in line with small team huddle
  • Department leadership huddle every other day to coordinate and align across teams
  • Management team huddle meets on offset day with department leadership huddle
  • Outcome: Daily resolution of team level issues, department and cross company issues addressed on average in one day at worst in two days

In all those models a key thing is that escalation is built into the core communication structure of the company.   The vast majority of issues that arise do not need to be handled exceptionally.   They can be handled as part of the already scheduled meetings.   This leads to a massive reduction in exceptional, one-off meetings that go on calendars, “surprises" in all their various and sundry forms and more focused time for your job. 

So if a company tells you "we don't do huddles", my god, run away.   It means they're coordinating ad-hoc via Slack, heroics, or yet-another-meeting.

Are they required?

Yes.  Our position is that huddles are required for your team unless you have overwhelmingly strong evidence - hard data - that they are deleterious for your team.  In general, if you run any team that does, you know, "work", you should have a huddle.

That noted, a daily cadence can be more than is practical for many teams.  It is common to see teams that start with daily standups, find they don't have tons of stuff to talk about and then move to every other day schedules.    Roughly the patterns we see there are:

• Daily Standups - The team handles a lot of fast-moving items with dependencies, a high support load or frequent incidents that require discussion.
• Three Times a Week - The team handles deeper work blocks with fewer dependencies and has stable routines for doing the work.

What we'd strongly counsel skepticism over is the team that says "well we used to do daily, nobody said anything, so we just stopped doing them."   Almost always that's a symptom to the team no running the huddle effectively versus the huddle itself not being effective.

Huddle Types

• Team Huddle - The most common type of huddle with a group of individual contributors and their manager.   This is the core atomic unit of huddles and is all about keeping execution honest and open with clear, daily visibility into blockers.
• Department Huddle - The second most common type of huddle that starts when you have multiple teams in a department.  Here the managers of each team, the department head and key employees get together to coordinate work across the entire department.   This is about resolving cross-team conflicts, ensuring teams have the right resource levels, handling escalations, determining what escalations need standard approaches (such that they are avoided in the future) and reinforcing systemic priorities.
• Leadership Team Huddle - When you have multiple departments with a head for each.  This is about coordinating company wide work and managing through inter-departmental issues. 
• Cross-department Huddle - Special case huddles that are established and live as long as needed.   These occur when shared delivery requires it such as during a launch, when responding to a major incidents or handling cross-functional programs or initiatives.

What's a huddle look like?

• No longer than 15 minutes in length - short and specific to the work at hand
  • If it needs to be longer you're probably getting pulled into an issue that needs to be broken out of a huddle and handled either in a standalone meeting or via a more well thought out process.  Best practice is to create a breakout as soon as possible after the huddle with only the necessary people.
• ~1 minute per person. Some days are faster. If it’s consistently slower, your format is broken.
• The standard agenda
  • Every huddle on every team runs the same way.
  • No one should ever ask “what are we talking about today?”
  • Key pieces for each person to cover
    • Recap - What I did since the last huddle
      • “Yesterday I shipped / closed / delivered ___.”
    • Commitment - What I'm going to get done by the next huddle
      • * “By next huddle I will have ___ done.”
    • Blockers - What I’m stuck on or need help with
      • “I’m blocked by ___ (owner needed: ___).”
    • Flags - Escalations, incidents or exceptional items that need to have increased visibility so they can get more resources
      • “I want to flag  ___ for the broader team (risk, escalation, customer issue).”

And. That's.  All.  You can run an entire company’s execution rhythm on that skeleton.

Rules of the Road

• This is the team’s meeting.  It is not a courtroom where the manager interrogates.  The team is responsible for telling each other what they are doing and what is the issue.
• It's not about performance or feedback.  If it becomes performative, people will stop raising blockers and your huddle becomes useless.
• It's intentionally shallow.   If we need to deep problem-solving that comes later with the correct narrow group.  Blockers get captured, owners assigned, and a breakout happens right after.
• It's short.  If someone needs 5 minutes, great, that’s a breakout.
• We're looking for commitments, not attempts.   "I'm working on X" is a status update.   "I'm going to complete X" is a commitment.  We're seeking the latter.
• Blockers are gold.  If “nobody is blocked” every day, that’s usually not excellence—it’s a psychological safety failure or people hiding problems until they explode.

Escalations

A huddle is only as good as its escalation path.   The expected flow for escalations is Team → Department → Leadership.   If you stack the huddles in a one hour block of time that means any issue in the company can typically get attention and a course towards resolution within a day. 

While not a rule, judgement of the people in the situation should govern, I'd recommend these rough guidelines for escalation: 

• If a blocker can’t be cleared in **2 hours**, it gets escalated to the next level.
• If it impacts a customer, launch, revenue, or production, escalate immediately.
• The person blocked owns getting unblocked and has authority to escalate until things are resolved
• The manager owns supporting that person AND analyzing the root cause of the blocker to try and keep it from repeating
• Department heads own cross-team resolution.

Remote Best Practices

At 1 to 100 all our huddles are remote but in many companies you'll have hybrid huddles with some people remote and some in the room.  Remote huddles fail if the “real” huddle only happens in the room.  To that end we recommend:

• Everyone joins the same way when possible (even co-located people on laptops) to keep audio equitable.
• No side chatter. If remote people can’t hear it, it didn’t happen.
• Use a lightweight written structure (Slack/Notion/Linear comment) so updates don’t get lost.
• Spend time figuring out the "mutually inconvenient" timing when everyone can be on the line at the same time
  • Yes, you can do async standup posts but, honestly, they suck and I'd much prefer a live standup at a weird time

What about customer work and conflicts?

If you’re in a service or billable delivery model, huddles are often billable you just need to be disciplined and thoughtful.  Some easy way to think through that:

• If the work discussed is client related you can bill it.  In some cases, yes, you'll bill the same huddle to multiple clients as multiple projects are discussed.
• If you keep to a tight, 15 minute timing overlap across clients will be minimized
• Don’t give people the option to bill “general team admin” or some other "internal" bucket.   That sends the message this meeting is just overhead.  It's not.  It's about coordinating work we do for clients so it should be billable to someone in most cases.  

How This Will Go Wrong

• Your huddle will turn into a boring, long status meeting everyone hates
  • Strongly enforce the timebox
  • Force the people that run long to write up their updates before the meetings
  • Be rigorous in moving problem-solving to breakouts
• People won't bring up blockers or none will seem to exists
  • Model sharing blockers so people know stuff happens
  • Explicitly search for blockers with alternate questions like “what’s the riskiest thing on your plate?”
• The same stuff is reported as a blocker every day
  • A blocker has an owner (the person that brought it up or is assigned to it)
  • A blocker has a resolution plan - here's how we'll fix it
  • A blocker has a resolution deadline
  • Be clear that repeated blockers are a management failure, not an individual failure.
• We get lots of updates - "I'm working on this" with no commitments
  • Require the format “by next huddle I will have ___ done.”
  • If a person can't commit to something they probably haven't sufficiently planned the breakdown of their work
• The huddle is manager-driven and becomes a manager interrogation
  • Assign a facilitator for each meeting from the team that is not the manager
  • The manager's only focus is unblocking

What It Feels Like When You Get It Right

• Work will move rapidly with few surprises
• Blockers clear the same-day instead
• Ad-hoc meetings decrease because everyone knows how coordination is handled
• People trust the system: escalation paths exist, and commitments mean something.
• Execution becomes visible without micromanagement.