Three months ago, I was in a sprint planning meeting that went completely off the rails. In the best possible way.
We were forty minutes in, and nobody could agree on priorities. Engineering wanted to tackle tech debt. Design wanted to ship the new onboarding flow. Sales was pressuring us for a specific customer feature. I was trying to referee while also pushing my own roadmap items.
Then our newest engineer, who'd been quiet the whole time, unmuted and said:
"Can I ask a dumb question? Does anyone actually know what everyone else is working on right now?"
Silence.
The Uncomfortable Truth
We went around the (virtual) room. It turned out that nobody had a complete picture. I knew my priorities. Engineering had their list. Design had theirs. But the overlap? The dependencies? The actual state of in-progress work? Fuzzy at best.
We'd been operating on assumptions and Slack updates for months. "I think Jamie is almost done with the API" or "I'm pretty sure design signed off on that." Pretty sure. I think.
The Real Problem
This wasn't anyone's fault. We'd grown from 8 to 22 people in a year. The informal communication that worked at 8 doesn't scale to 22. We just hadn't noticed the decay.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
The obvious solution was more meetings. So we added a weekly cross-functional sync. Then a bi-weekly stakeholder update. Then office hours for "quick questions."
Within a month, people were spending 40% of their week in meetings. Actual work happened in the cracks between calendar blocks. The cure was worse than the disease.
We tried async video updates next. Every Monday, record a 5-minute Loom about what you're working on. This lasted three weeks before people started "forgetting" or sending one-sentence updates that said nothing.
The problem wasn't commitment—it was friction. Adding yet another task to people's plates just created resentment.
The Shift That Actually Worked
The breakthrough came from an unexpected place. One of our engineers had been experimenting with a shared Gryphin board for the backend team. Nothing fancy—just their tasks, visible to everyone.
But she'd set up the real-time presence features, so you could see who was looking at what. And they'd started using the board chat for quick discussions instead of Slack.
What she told me:
"I don't need a meeting to know what's happening anymore. I just look at the board for two minutes in the morning."
That comment stuck with me.
Rolling It Out (Slowly)
We didn't do a big tool migration. Instead, we started with one cross-functional project—our mobile app redesign. One board. All the stakeholders. Real-time presence on.
The first week was mostly just observation. People would pop into the board, see who else was there, see what was moving, and leave. No meetings required.
By week two, interesting things started happening:
- Spontaneous collaboration: Design would see an engineer looking at a card and just start a chat: "Hey, you working on this? Want to pair for 10 min?"
- Visible bottlenecks: I noticed when things were stuck because cards would sit in the same column for days with no activity
- Passive communication: Dependencies became visible. You could literally see when someone was blocked because they'd keep checking a card that was assigned to someone else
The information was flowing without anyone having to push it.
What Changed
Six weeks later, we cut our standing meetings by half. Not through some mandate, but because they felt redundant. Why have a sync about what everyone's working on when you can see it?
50%
Fewer meetings
75 min
Sprint planning (was 3hrs)
Zero
"What's the status?" messages
The Counterintuitive Part
You might think that more visibility would feel like surveillance. That was my fear too. But the feedback from the team was the opposite—it felt like less pressure, not more.
When your work is visible, you don't need to perform visibility. No more "just wanted to share a quick update" messages that are really "please notice I'm working" messages. No more anxiety about whether people know what you're doing.
One of our designers put it well:
"I used to spend 30 minutes a day making sure people knew I was making progress. Now the board does that for me."
What I'd Tell Past Me
If I could go back to that messy sprint planning meeting, here's what I'd say:
The problem isn't communication—it's visibility. You can't communicate your way out of a visibility problem. More meetings, more updates, more Slack messages—they all add friction. And friction compounds.
Instead, make the work itself visible. Make presence visible. Make progress visible. Then communication happens naturally, in context, when it's actually needed.
That nervous new engineer asked the right question. We just needed three months to find the right answer.
Priya has been building products for 10 years, most recently leading product at a B2B SaaS company. She writes about product management and team dynamics.