Daily standup questions

The questions decide what a standup produces. Ask for a diary and you get diary entries nobody reads. Ask about movement, risk and dependencies and you get coordination. This page has the classic set, three tests for a good question, and five copy-paste sets tuned for different teams and cadences.

1The classic three

What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Anything blocking you?

They persist because they cover the past, the future and the risk in three lines, and everyone already knows how to answer them. Their failure mode is autopilot: after a few weeks the answers turn into status written for the boss, the blocker line goes permanently empty, and the digest becomes something people skim out of politeness. The fix is not more questions. It is sharper ones.

2Three tests for a good question

• Someone acts on the answer. For each question, name who reads the answer and what they would do differently because of it. If the honest answer is nobody and nothing, cut the question.
• It is answerable in two sentences. A question that invites a paragraph gets skipped on busy days, and busy days are when you most need the answer.
• It asks about movement or risk, not activity. "I was in meetings and did code review" is a true answer to the wrong question. Hours are not information; progress and slippage are.

The same tests turn the classics into better versions:

• "What did you do yesterday?" becomes "What moved yesterday?" It asks for progress, not a log of hours.
• "What will you do today?" becomes "What will be done by tomorrow?" A commitment you can check tomorrow, instead of a plan that resets every morning.
• "Anything blocking you?" becomes "What do you need from someone else today?" It names a dependency while there is still time to act on it, and it is much harder to answer with a reflexive "nothing".

3Five sets to copy

The tightened classic, daily:

1. What moved yesterday?
2. What will be done by tomorrow?
3. What is in your way, and who can remove it?

For dependency-heavy teams such as platform or integration work, daily:

1. What are you shipping today?
2. What do you need from someone else to ship it?
3. What are you sitting on that someone else is waiting for?

The weekly pulse, Monday mornings:

1. What is the one thing that must happen this week?
2. What is most at risk of slipping?
3. How is your workload: too light, about right, too much?

The end-of-day wrap, for teams handing work across time zones:

1. What got done today?
2. What should the next timezone pick up?
3. Anything that will bite us overnight?

Retro lite, every other Friday:

1. What worked well this fortnight?
2. What was annoying?
3. What is one thing we should change next sprint?

4How many questions

Three. Four is the ceiling. Every question you add costs response rate, and response rate is the thing that decides whether the standup survives. If two questions keep getting the same answer, merge them. One slot can rotate as the team's situation changes; the blocker slot never rotates out.

5When answers go stale

The signals: "same as yesterday" appearing more than once a week, an empty blocker line for two straight weeks, or answers growing past a paragraph. A useful check is to open last Tuesday's digest and ask what anyone did because of it. If the answer is nothing, change the middle question before people stop answering altogether.

Swapping a question should not rewrite the past. In asyncmate, past runs keep the questions they were actually asked with, so history stays honest after an edit.

Try a set: asyncmate's standup preset starts from the classic three, and every question is editable, so any set on this page pastes straight in. See Create a standup check-in for the setup, or how the Slack standup bot works. Free for up to 10 people who answer.