Ten in the morning. The daily stand-up starts on time, which turns out to be the last thing about it that goes to plan.
We're eight developers on a scrum team, all remote. The meeting is boxed at fifteen minutes, and everyone knows it — it's right there in the calendar invite. Yet most days, around the point where the clock says fifteen, we're maybe halfway down the list of people, someone has just said the Japanese equivalent of "well, about that," and the next twenty minutes write themselves.
I've watched this happen for long enough that I've mostly stopped reading it as a failure. It behaves more like weather. So rather than argue with it, I want to describe it: what actually pushes a Japanese scrum stand-up to twice its allotted length, seen from inside one.
The shape of the meeting
We rotate the facilitator. A different developer runs it each day, which is a nice flat idea, and also — I'll come back to this — part of the problem.
The vocabulary is almost all English, worn smooth into Japanese. Nobody says "daily stand-up." We say デイリー (deirii). Sprint is スプリント, backlog is バックログ. If you've read anything I've written before, you already know this is how technical words travel here: they arrive in English, get spelled in katakana, and stay.
The flow itself is ordinary. Each person covers what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and anything they're stuck on or need to share. The current Scrum Guide has actually dropped the old "three questions" framing in favor of whatever structure the team likes, but in practice most teams I've seen still land on some version of yesterday-today-blockers. Ours does. On paper it's fifteen minutes of eight people giving short status.
In practice, two things reliably blow past the box.
Reason one: no one in the room can end your sentence for you
Scrum is deliberately flat. There's no lead calling on people, no manager steering, and on our team the facilitator is just whoever's turn it is. That flatness is the point — and it's also why the meeting has no brakes.
When someone starts explaining a problem in more detail than the slot allows, somebody has to decide to cut it short. On a team with a clear owner, that person does it: "let's take this offline." On ours, the facilitator is a peer who'll be back in the normal rotation tomorrow, with no particular standing to shush anyone. So they usually don't. And the rest of us, honestly, don't either. There's a strong instinct here to let a person finish, to not talk over them, to wait for a natural gap that a genuinely stuck engineer never quite reaches.
I don't want to stretch this into a claim about the whole country — I only sit in one team's stand-up. But I'll say the softer version, because I think it holds: meetings here tend to run long, opinions tend to arrive wrapped in hedges, and a firm conclusion can be slow to surface. Put that tendency inside a structure that removes the one person with the authority to say "stop," and fifteen minutes was never realistic.
Reason two: the stand-up is where the cross-team stuff lands
The status part is fast. What stretches the meeting is everything that isn't strictly our own work: coordinating with another team, chasing an answer we're blocked on, hashing out who owns a handoff that sits between two groups. None of that fits in a status update, and none of it belongs to any single person's "today."
The reason it ends up in the stand-up anyway is simple arithmetic. If we don't deal with it here, while the relevant people happen to be in the same call, it becomes a separate meeting later — a new invite, a new fifteen minutes that will also run long, for the same reasons. Given that trade, letting the stand-up absorb it is often the cheaper option. So the fifteen-minute status meeting quietly does a second job as the place where the team's external friction gets worked out.
So is it broken?
By the letter of it, yes. The Scrum Guide is blunt: the Daily Scrum is a fifteen-minute event. We are not a fifteen-minute event. If you scored us against the framework, we'd lose points.
I've come around to a less tidy view. When we run over, it's usually because the meeting is doing work that has to land somewhere and no one has built a better place for it — the cross-team coordination is genuine, and dropping it doesn't make it go away. The reluctance to cut a struggling teammate off mid-thought is, if I'm honest, not a habit I'm in a hurry to train out of the team. Could we tighten it — hard fifteen-minute cap, park everything else into a follow-up? Probably. Some days I want to. But every version of "fix it" I've tried just moves the same half hour to a different slot on the calendar, and now it's two meetings instead of one.
So for now it stays a thirty-minute stand-up, and I've stopped pretending that's a temporary state.
If you join a Japanese scrum team from somewhere the stand-up really does end at fifteen minutes, this is the part worth knowing in advance: block out thirty. The meeting is carrying more than its name suggests — the coordination that doesn't fit anywhere else, and a room full of people who'd rather run over than cut you off. Nobody's disorganized; the stand-up is just quietly doing two jobs. Once you stop expecting fifteen, it's a pretty good half hour.
Sources
- Scrum Guide (2020), Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland — Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event; the older "three questions" structure is no longer prescribed. https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html
