Khan's Blog

I’ve just birthed my first app to the world, Standup Timer. Its been released on Google Play for Android devices. I actually created this very simple app over a year ago, but I was simply too lazy/too cheap to pay the once off $25 developer fee. However, the whole process of getting an APK on the store was very painless, and I should have done it a while ago.

Motivation

Standup Timer was born out a motivation to reduce the amount of time we spend at our daily morning meeting (you may know it as a Stand Up or Scrum). When I started at Qantas and our team grew to its full size, I found that we took around 25 minutes to go through 8 peoples updates. Retrospectives brought up that standup was too long, and having seen other teams whip through them in less time (and with more people), we knew it could be done. I started to lead some standups and, without saying anything, found that if we displayed a stopwatch or a timer, we would suddenly take half the time as if we had no time visible.

Solution

We tried using a kitchen timer, which was loud, clunky and didn’t display seconds. We tried using a normal timer or stopwatch on our phones, but we found that the screen would time-out after a few minutes. We needed something subtle, simple and with a big display of the time remaining that doesn’t disappear. The solution was this app, Standup Timer, whose only features are literally displaying how much time you have left, together with a neat animation which covers your screen with red as you run out of time. Oh, it keeps your screen on too.

Check it out on the Google Play.