I Don't Miss the Standup

I used to think a team was the only way to move fast. For finding out what’s worth building at all, I’ve stopped believing that.

Here’s what left my week when I started shipping alone. The standup. The “quick sync.” The planning ceremony to decide what was already agreed in Slack. The 6pm merge conflict. The drift between what I described on Monday and what came back the following Friday.

I don’t miss those particular hours. That isn’t the same as saying teams are a waste. It’s saying the coordination those rituals exist to manage was optional for the work I was actually doing, and I hadn’t noticed how much of the week it owned until it was gone.

What’s left is one head, one product, one direction. The whole thing fits in working memory because I never had to externalize it for anyone. No handoff docs. No re-explaining the vision until it stopped being mine.

People hear “solo” and picture limited. For zero-to-one, it’s often the opposite. I’m shipping more in parallel than I used to in sequence, and each product is more coherent, because one taste runs through it end to end.

One person, one product, one purpose. Multiply across bets instead of stacking people onto one.

Teams aren’t dead. Teams are how you go deep on one hard, known thing, and when that’s the job I’d hire tomorrow. Scale, continuity, regulated domains, anything that has to outlive one person’s calendar: that’s still a team problem. But for finding out what’s worth building at all, the default has flipped. Treating a team as the only serious starting point is a habit from when coordination was the price of shipping anything at all. That price dropped. The habit hasn’t always kept up.

The honest part isn’t strategic, though. It’s that this is the most fun I’ve had building software in years. It’s faster. It’s cleaner. And when something ships, I know exactly whose work I’m looking at.

I could be wrong about how far this scales. I might hit a wall next quarter and hire. If I do, it won’t prove the old rituals were the point. It’ll mean the work changed shape.

The mechanics of why this works are in One Person, One Product, One Purpose, if you want the long version.