Three standup templates, and the case for deleting the meeting

The 2020 Scrum Guide quietly deleted the three questions. Yesterday, today, blockers: gone from the text, replaced by a single line saying the Developers can pick whatever structure they want as long as it produces a plan for the next day. Most teams never noticed, and are still running a standup meeting agenda built on a format its own authors dropped six years ago.

Below are three templates you can copy: daily, async, and a scaled version for several teams. Then the part that matters more than the format, which is when to stop having the meeting.

Template 1: the daily standup meeting agenda

Fifteen minutes, hard stop, same time every day. Standing up is optional and always was.

DAILY STANDUP
Time: 15 min, timeboxed. Same slot daily.
Facilitator: rotates weekly.
Attendees: the people doing the work. Managers optional and silent.

0:00  Sprint goal, read aloud. One sentence. Same one every day.
0:30  Board walk, RIGHT TO LEFT.
      Start with the ticket closest to done.
      Per ticket, 30 sec max:
        - Is it moving?
        - What is stopping it?
        - Does anyone else need to touch it today?
      Do NOT go person by person.
12:00 Blockers list. Read back. Each one gets a name and a
      time today, not "I'll look into it".
13:00 Parking lot. Name the topic, name who is staying on,
      move on. No discussion in the room.
15:00 End. Anyone not in the parking lot leaves.

RULES
- No status for the benefit of the manager.
- If two people start debugging, that is a parking lot item.
- If a blocker is older than 48 hours it goes to the
  facilitator to escalate, not back on the list.

The right-to-left board walk is the single change that does the most. Going person by person produces a round of reports; walking the board produces a conversation about work that is nearly finished, which is the work most likely to actually ship this week.

Template 2: remote and async standup

For distributed teams across more than about four hours of timezone spread, a live daily call costs somebody their evening. Write it down instead.

ASYNC STANDUP  (channel post, by 10:00 local)

Sprint goal: [one line, pinned in the channel]

@name
  Moving:    TICKET-123 review, TICKET-140 ready for QA
  Stuck on:  TICKET-118, waiting on staging DB restore
             -> need @ops, blocking since Tue
  Need eyes: PR #4471 (small)
  Away:      15:00-17:00 UTC

THREAD RULES
- Blockers get a reply within 3 working hours or they
  get escalated by the facilitator. Silence is not an answer.
- Replies go in the thread, never in the main channel.
- One live 25-minute call per week for the things that
  genuinely need voices.

Async standups fail in one predictable way: everyone posts, nobody reads. The three-hour reply rule on blockers is what stops it becoming a wall of ignored updates, and it needs one named person whose job is to notice. Without that, delete the ritual.

Template 3: scaled standup for several teams

Once you have three or more teams sharing a goal, the per-team standup stays and a second, shorter meeting joins it. One representative each, and it’s about the seams between teams, not the work inside them.

SCALED STANDUP  (a.k.a. scrum of scrums)
Time: 12 min. Starts 20 min after team standups end.
Attendees: 1 rep per team + 1 person who can unblock across teams.

Per team, 90 seconds:
  1. Are we on track for the shared milestone? yes / at risk / no
  2. What did we finish that ANOTHER team was waiting on?
  3. What are we waiting on from ANOTHER team, and since when?
  4. What are we about to break for someone else?

Then:
  - Cross-team blockers only. Named owner, date.
  - Anything single-team goes back to that team's standup.

NOT IN THIS MEETING
  - Individual ticket status
  - Design debate
  - Anything with an audience of one

Question 4 is the one people skip and the one that pays for the meeting. A team knowing it’s about to change a shared schema on Thursday is worth more than four teams reciting how they are doing.

Why the three questions fail

The classic format asks what you did yesterday, what you are doing today, and what is blocking you. It produces status theatre almost every time, and the mechanism isn’t mysterious.

Answering the first question in front of your manager creates an incentive to sound busy. So people list activity rather than progress, the meeting fills with the safest possible sentences, and the blockers question arrives at minute 13 when everyone has stopped listening. Nobody is being dishonest. The format is asking for a performance and people give one.

The Scrum Guide now describes the purpose as inspecting progress toward the sprint goal and adapting the plan, and leaves the structure open. That’s a better brief. It changes the question from “what did you do” to “what is between us and the goal”, and only the second one is worth fifteen minutes of six people’s time.

The Agile Manifesto’s principles talk about the team reflecting at regular intervals and tuning its behaviour. The standup is meant to be one of those tuning loops. If yours has run the same way for eleven months, it isn’t a loop, it’s a habit.

Timeboxing that survives contact with a real team

No standup meeting agenda holds without a timebox somebody actually enforces. Fifteen minutes is a ceiling, not a target. A six-person team on a clear sprint should finish in seven.

Three things keep it there. Put the timer on screen where everyone can see it, because a visible clock does more than any amount of facilitation. Give the facilitator explicit permission to cut people off, and rotate the role weekly so it isn’t always the same person being unpopular. And hold the parking lot rigidly: name the topic, name who stays, move on within about ten seconds.

One thing that doesn’t work, in my opinion: making the meeting shorter by adding structure. Ten-minute standups with a strict speaking order and a token you pass around tend to run longer than loose ones, because the ceremony itself takes time. More detail on running these well is in our standup tips, and the general agenda mechanics are in the agenda template guide.

When to kill the standup entirely

Some teams shouldn’t have one, and saying so out loud is rarer than it should be.

Kill it when the team is two or three people who already talk all day. Kill it when everyone works on separate, non-overlapping projects, because then it’s a reporting line wearing a meeting’s clothes. Kill it when attendance has drifted to the point where the same two people carry it. And kill it, at least temporarily, when the honest answer to “what changed since yesterday” has been nothing for a week, which usually means the work items are too big rather than that the team is idle.

Replace it with a written update and a channel where blockers get answered, and see who complains after two weeks. If nobody does, you were right. That test is cheap and most teams never run it because cancelling a standup feels like admitting something. Our take on the wider version of this problem is in the meeting that could have been an email, and the broader mechanics are in how to run effective meetings.

Making the notes stop eating the meeting

The standup meeting agenda templates above assume somebody captures blockers and owners. In practice that person is half-listening because they are typing, which is a bad trade in a meeting this short.

Craqly is a desktop app that follows the call on Zoom, Teams or Google Meet without joining as a bot in the participant list, and pulls out decisions and action items while the meeting is still running. For a standup the useful output is small: the blockers named, who owns each, and what got committed to today. The free Starter plan gives 20 credits a month, one credit being one minute of live session, and credits reset every month. Paid plans start at $19 a month billed yearly, or $38 month to month.

I wouldn’t automate the facilitation, though. The value in a standup is somebody noticing that a ticket has been “nearly done” for four days, and that noticing is a human job.

Pick one template, run it for two weeks without changing it, then ask the team a single question: did this meeting change what you did that day? If the answer is no more often than yes, the format isn’t the problem.