For years, we ran daily standups like clockwork — 10:15am sharp, five days a week. But the truth was, they had become a ritual more than a necessity. Attendance was consistent. Engagement wasn’t. People would show up, repeat Jira ticket numbers, and mentally check out until it was their turn. By the time the meeting ended, we'd spent 15 minutes saying very little of value to each other and even less that was actionable.

So earlier this year, we ran an experiment: what if we replaced daily standups with a dev-facing changelog? No meetings. Just one well-maintained internal doc, updated asynchronously. Here’s what happened.

The Problem We Wanted to Solve

We weren’t trying to be edgy or anti-process. We just wanted to fix three things:

Context without friction: Engineers needed visibility into what their teammates were building, blocked by, or shipping — without another meeting on the calendar.

Focus time protection: The 10:15am standup was splitting people’s mornings. You couldn’t really get into a deep flow before or after it.

Signal over noise: Daily updates had become performative. We wanted something more honest — and more useful.

The System We Built

We stood up a team changelog, published every day by 11:00am in Slack and Notion. Here's what it includes:

• What shipped yesterday

  • Brief notes on merges, deploys, feature flags toggled

• Brief notes on merges, deploys, and feature flags toggled

  • What we’re working on today High-level updates from each engineer — just the essentials

• Blockers

  • Anything slowing someone down (infra, approvals, questions)

• Notes / Links

  • Relevant Slack threads, PRs, or docs

Engineers drop their updates in a simple shared Notion template. One of us from engineering leadership reviews, formats, and posts it in Slack by 11. We automated reminders to keep it low-lift: If no update is submitted by 10:45, the engineer gets a gentle ping from our team Slackbot.

What Improved (and What Didn’t)

✅ More signal, less noise: Instead of hearing "Working on the same ticket" for the fifth day in a row, we now get real status updates: what shipped, what’s changing, and who’s blocked.

✅ Better historical context: Having 3+ months of searchable changelogs has been surprisingly useful. When questions like “When did we roll that out?” or “Who changed X?” pop up — we just search the doc.

✅ Asynchronous = calmer mornings: Engineers don’t need to start the day with a meeting. They control their own flow and still stay plugged in.

❌ Less spontaneous collaboration: This is the biggest trade-off. Standups sometimes sparked helpful side convos. That spontaneity doesn’t happen as easily in Notion. To counter this, we added a Thursday “engineering huddle” — a 30-minute optional sync focused on demos, decisions, and discussion, not status.

💡 Lessons for Other Teams: Don’t go async without buy-in. We made this shift only after engineers voiced frustration with standups. This wasn’t a top-down decision — it came from the team.

Make one person accountable for the changelog. We rotate every sprint, but someone owns quality and publishing daily. Without that, async dies fast.

Async doesn’t mean invisible. We make the changelog easy to find, easy to update, and most importantly, easy to read. No long paragraphs. No filler.

Final Thoughts

This change didn’t revolutionize our engineering output. But it made our mornings quieter, our updates more useful, and our culture a bit more respectful of how engineers actually work. If your standups feel stale — or if your calendar looks like a game of Tetris — it might be time to give async a try. Start with a changelog. Keep it simple. Iterate from there.