Daily standup meeting template
Use the fill-in version on this page to write your own update, then copy it into Slack or wherever your team posts. Nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere. Below you will find the template itself, what separates a useful answer from a filler one, a written version for distributed teams, and an agenda for running the meeting live.
The template
Yesterday:
Today:
Blockers:
Three questions, each answered in a sentence or two. What you finished or moved forward, what you will work on next, and anything in your way. "None" is a perfectly good answer to the third. New to the format? See what a standup meeting is, including how it differs from the Daily Scrum.
Useful answers and filler ones
The template is easy to fill in badly. The difference is almost always specificity. These are illustrative.
Filler: "Yesterday: worked on the API." Useful: "Yesterday: merged the rate-limit middleware; the load test still fails above two thousand requests a second."
Filler: "Today: more of the same." Useful: "Today: fix the load test failure, then start on retries."
Filler: "Blockers: none really." Useful: "Blockers: I need staging credentials for the payment provider, and only Priya can create them."
A useful answer tells the team something they could act on. A filler answer only tells them you attended.
The async written version
For a team spread across time zones, a meeting at a shared hour is often impossible or unfair to someone. The same three questions work in writing:
Yesterday:
Today:
Blockers: (name who can help)
Two adjustments make it work. Post it at the start of your own day, in a shared channel rather than a private message, so the update is waiting for whoever wakes up next. And name the person who can help with a blocker, because in writing nobody is in the room to volunteer.
Running the live meeting: a 15-minute agenda
If your team does meet, this keeps it short:
- Start on time. No recap of what was said yesterday.
- Each person, the three questions, about a minute each. Updates only.
- Anything that needs discussion goes to a parking lot. It gets talked through straight after, with only the people involved.
- Last two minutes: assign each blocker an owner. A blocker without an owner is just a complaint.
The two ways a standup goes wrong are both covered by that list. It turns into a status report for one manager, which is fixed by keeping it to updates between teammates, and it turns into problem-solving for the whole group, which is fixed by the parking lot.
When a standup is the wrong tool
If your team spans many time zones, or the meeting has quietly become a status report for one person, a daily meeting may cost more than it returns. See async standups versus daily meetings and how to run an async standup in Slack.
If you run the standup for a team
Eodly asks each person for these same answers in Slack, Telegram or Discord (Microsoft Teams coming soon), weighs each claim against what actually moved in GitHub and Linear, and sends you one page each evening showing who shipped, who is silent, and who is slipping. For the end-of-day version of this update, see the end-of-day report template.