Standup Meeting: Format, Agenda and an Async Version

A standup meeting is a short daily meeting, usually 15 minutes or less, where a team checks progress toward a shared goal, surfaces blockers and agrees on the plan for the next day. The name comes from the habit of standing to keep it short. In Scrum it is called the Daily Scrum; other teams say daily standup or daily huddle.

What is a standup meeting?

A standup meeting is a daily check-in where a small team looks at how the work is moving and adjusts the plan. It comes from agile software development, and teams outside software run a similar daily huddle.

Its job is coordination between the people doing the work: who needs help, what is stuck, what changes today. It is not where a manager collects updates or where problems get solved in depth.

Standing does shorten meetings. In a University of Missouri study of meetings lasting about 10 to 20 minutes, groups that stood finished significantly faster than groups that sat, and their decisions were no worse (University of Missouri, 1998; published as Bluedorn, Turban and Love, 1999). For a remote team, a hard timebox can do the same job.

Standup vs Daily Scrum

Every Daily Scrum is a standup, but not every standup is a Daily Scrum. The 2020 Scrum Guide sets these rules (Scrum Guide, November 2020):

• Purpose: "to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary".
• Length and attendees: 15 minutes, for the Developers. The Product Owner and Scrum Master join as Developers only if they work on Sprint Backlog items.
• When: the same time and place every working day of the Sprint.
• Format: any structure, as long as it focuses on the Sprint Goal and produces "an actionable plan for the next day of work".

The 2020 revision removed the three Daily Scrum questions to make the guide less prescriptive, and an earlier revision had warned: "Too often it is seen as a status event" (Scrum Guides revision history, retrieved 3 November 2026). Teams outside Scrum can borrow the same rules: one goal, one timebox, one plan at the end.

A 15-minute standup meeting agenda

A good stand up meeting agenda has four timeboxed blocks. This version suits a team of five to nine people:

Fifteen minutes is the upper limit. Researchers at the University of Oslo and SINTEF observed 102 standups in 15 teams at four companies between 2010 and 2018; they averaged 11.7 minutes, ranging from 4 to 24 (Stray, Moe and Sjøberg, IEEE Software, 2020).

The three questions, and better alternatives

The classic daily standup asks each person:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. Do I see any impediments?

The first question pulls the meeting toward reporting. In the eight standups Stray, Moe and Sjøberg transcribed and coded, only 34% of the time went to the three questions, and 66% of that went to "what I did yesterday", the question interviewees were least happy to spend time on. Problem-solving usually followed "today" or "impediments", rarely "yesterday". Their first recommendation: drop the yesterday question.

Walk the board

Go through the work items on your board instead of person by person, starting with the items closest to done. Jason Yip's standup patterns call this letting the work items attend rather than the people (martinfowler.com, 21 February 2016). He cites Pawel Brodzinski's default order: blockers, expedited items, items that have not moved since the last standup, then everything else by priority. The board also fixes "I can't remember what I did yesterday", because the board remembers.

Goal-first standup

Open with the goal and ask the room one question: "What stands between us and the goal, and what are we doing about it today?" It is closest to what the Scrum Guide now asks for. If you want a fixed script instead, use two questions: "What will you move forward today?" and "What is in your way?"

Facilitation rules that keep it short

• Keep a parking lot. Anything that needs more than a sentence goes on a visible list for after the standup. Yip's summary: tell the headline, not the whole story.
• Talk to the team, not the lead. Stray and colleagues found that when the facilitator handed out turns and people addressed them, the standup became a reporting meeting; one participant said it felt like having oral exams every day. Rotate the facilitator.
• Decide who speaks without a referee. Yip suggests a fixed order, "last arrival speaks first", or passing a token.
• Prefer video to audio-only calls. In the same study, teams whose facilitators used video rather than audio alone had more discussion-focused meetings. A short camera-on call is a modest ask; leave it to the team.
• Pick the least disruptive time. Early standups were often delayed by late arrivals, and many team members saw the meeting as a disruptive interruption to their work. The researchers suggest meeting right before lunch, which merges two interruptions into one.
• Watch the team size. Stray and colleagues report, from an earlier survey of theirs, that satisfaction dropped significantly in teams of more than 12. Split large teams by who actually depends on whom.

Standups for remote and multi-time-zone teams

Remote standups need the same agenda plus a time that works for everyone. About 30% of meetings in Microsoft 365 now span more than one time zone (Microsoft WorkLab, 17 June 2025; vendor research from Microsoft 365 telemetry).

• Two or three time zones: put the standup inside the overlap in working hours. A time zone meeting planner shows which hours fall inside everyone's working day.
• No real overlap: run regional standups with a written handoff, or move the update to async and meet live once or twice a week.
• Hybrid teams: everyone joins from their own laptop, so remote people are not an audience for a room.
• Rotate the inconvenience. If someone must join early or late, change who each month.
• Adapt the frequency. Stray and colleagues suggest a well-communicating team stop meeting daily if three or four times a week is enough.

Async standup: format, template and example

An async standup replaces the daily call with a short written update that each person posts by an agreed time. Stray and colleagues suggest a version of this for teams that do not need to meet daily: post the answers electronically and keep a less frequent meeting for problem-solving. Ground rules:

• Post by a fixed local time, for example 10:00 in your own time zone.
• Reply in a thread under the update, not in the main channel.
• Anyone blocked for more than a day gets a call, not another message.
• Keep one short live session a week for decisions.

For response-time norms and more templates, see the async communication guide.

Daily standup template

Copy this into Slack, Teams or a shared doc:

• Goal: [The sprint or weekly goal, in one line.]
• Done since last update: [One to three outcomes, with links. What changed, not how busy you were.]
• Next: [The one or two things you will move forward today.]
• Blocked or at risk: [What is stuck, who it is waiting on, since when. "None" is fine.]
• Heads-up: [Optional. Time off, a change that affects a teammate, a decision you need by a date.]

Example async standup update

A hypothetical update from a product designer on a small team:

• Goal: Ship the new onboarding flow by Friday.
• Done since last update: Mobile screens for steps 1 to 3 are final in Figma (link). Notes from Tuesday's usability tests are in the doc (link).
• Next: Step 4 empty states; hand steps 1 to 3 to Lena for build.
• Blocked or at risk: Waiting on legal for the consent wording since Monday. Without it by Thursday, step 2 ships with the old copy.
• Heads-up: Out Friday afternoon.

Every line is something a teammate can act on.

Signs your standup has become a status meeting

A standup has become a status meeting when it serves the listener more than the speakers:

• People face the lead, the lead picks the next speaker and asks most of the questions.
• Most of the time goes to yesterday, often with reasons why something took longer.
• Updates list activities ("had meetings, worked on tickets") rather than progress toward a goal.
• The same blocker comes up day after day without an owner.
• The team skips the meeting whenever the lead is away.

That last one shows up in the research too: one developer told Stray and colleagues that on the day the Scrum Master was not there, the team "probably had our best daily meeting". Before cancelling the meeting, try changing its format along the lines above. If the lead needs status, a written weekly report carries it better.

What a standup costs

A standup looks cheap because it is short, but it repeats every working day, and everyone also loses time switching in and out of their work. A worked example with hypothetical figures:

• 8 people, 15 minutes, plus 10 minutes each for switching.
• That is 200 person-minutes, about 3.3 person-hours, a day.
• Over 230 working days (46 weeks), about 767 person-hours, or 19 forty-hour weeks.
• At an assumed full employer cost of $60 an hour, about $46,000 a year.

Put your own team size, pay and frequency into the meeting cost calculator to see your number and what cutting five minutes or switching to written updates would save.

Write the async update from what you actually did

The hardest line in a standup update is "done since last update", because it relies on remembering yesterday, and that is where updates go vague. DoneThat reconstructs your workday from screen and app activity and writes a daily summary, so that line can start from a record instead of memory. Screenshots are processed and immediately deleted, never stored; you decide whether a summary stays private or is shared, and you can export or query your history by CSV, API or MCP. Screen-based capture is a bigger ask than a timer, and you still write the goal, next step and blockers yourself. For the end-of-day version of the same update, see the daily report template.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a standup meeting be?

Fifteen minutes at most, which is the Scrum Guide's limit for the Daily Scrum. Topics that need longer go on the parking lot for after the meeting.

What should I say in a daily standup?

What you will move forward today, what is in your way, and anything a teammate needs to know. Keep yesterday to one sentence about outcomes.

Start with one change

A standup works when it is short, about the goal and run for the people doing the work. Pick one change for next week: put the agenda above on a timer, drop the yesterday question, or move the update into writing and keep the call for blockers.

Sources

• Bluedorn, A. C., Turban, D. B. and Love, M. S. (1999). The Effects of Stand-Up and Sit-Down Meeting Formats on Meeting Outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 277 to 285. Findings as summarised in the University of Missouri press release Take a Stand on Meetings (23 July 1998).
• Microsoft (17 June 2025). Breaking down the infinite workday. Work Trend Index special report (vendor research); aggregated Microsoft 365 telemetry.
• Schwaber, K. and Sutherland, J. (November 2020). The 2020 Scrum Guide. Section "Daily Scrum".
• Scrum Guides. Revisions to the Scrum Guide. Changes between the 2017 and 2020 versions and earlier revisions. Retrieved 3 November 2026.
• Stray, V., Moe, N. B. and Sjøberg, D. I. K. (2020). Daily Stand-Up Meetings: Start Breaking the Rules. IEEE Software, 37(3), 70 to 77 (accepted preprint on arXiv). Multiple-case study: 60 interviews and 102 observed standups in 15 teams at four companies, 2010 to 2018; eight standups transcribed and coded.
• Yip, J. (21 February 2016). It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings. martinfowler.com.

Written by Don, DoneThat's AI coach (LinkedIn) - so this article is AI-written. Every statistic is cited next to the claim and linked in the Sources list, and vendor research is labeled as such. Published by DoneThat (Letss B.V., Amsterdam). More about DoneThat; corrections and questions go to support.