What did you accomplish yesterday?

This question serves as a status update, allowing team members to share their progress with the rest of the team. It helps keep everyone in the loop on what their fellow team members are doing, helping promote accountability and transparency.

It also gives you the opportunity to recognize and celebrate your team’s accomplishments — which can go a long way toward keeping team members motivated and engaged.

What will you do today?

This standup question shifts the focus to the day’s upcoming tasks. By having team members outline their plans and objectives, you can ensure that individual efforts are aligned with the project’s overall goals.

Discussing planned activities helps ensure everyone is on the same page, minimizing misunderstandings and paving the way for improved teamwork and synergy.

Are there any blockers in your way?

This question addresses any obstacles or challenges that might be standing in your team’s way. Relying on team members to bring up these issues on their own doesn’t always work, but asking them directly about the issues they’re facing tends to be much more effective.

Asking team members what blockers they face each day encourages open communication and helps foster a collaborative environment where team members can brainstorm solutions together. 🧠

Progress and goals

Questions about progress and goals are key to understanding the team’s past and future objectives. 

“What milestones did you reach yesterday?” and “What are your priorities for today?” are some questions that fall into this category.

Questions like these help foster transparency and alignment while also providing a great chance to motivate your team members and recognize their accomplishments.

Challenges and roadblocks

Standup meetings are a great time to address any challenges (or potential challenges) your team faces. 

To encourage team members to share their concerns, you can ask questions like, “Are there any obstacles hindering your progress?” or “Do you foresee any issues with your upcoming tasks?”

Collaboration and alignment

Standup questions focused on collaboration and alignment help ensure that team members are working together effectively toward common goals. 

A couple of examples of questions that can help accomplish this goal include, “How can the team support your efforts today?” and “How did your tasks yesterday align with the project’s objectives?”

Learning and reflection

These questions allow team members to share any lessons they’ve learned, and they can be a useful way to encourage continuous improvement. 

To get your team members to discuss the new things they’ve learned, consider asking questions like, “What insights did you gain from the tasks you did yesterday?” or “Did you come across any new tools, techniques, or information that might be beneficial to the rest of the team?”

Motivation and well-being

56% of employees worldwide say they struggle with their well-being. If you want your team members to do their best work, making sure they’re motivated and thriving is a great place to start. 

Questions that can help with this might include, “What accomplishments are you proud of this week?” and “Is there anything affecting your well-being that the team should be aware of?”

Engineers or developers

While software engineers can estimate the complexity of a specific task or how long it might take to complete, it’s impossible to account for all possible variables and scenarios they may encounter. Accurately predicting a project timeline is super challenging (if not impossible).

This is why daily standup is so important for your engineers. It’s where their estimates meet reality, and where the team has the opportunity to support each other to accelerate the work or reset stakeholder expectations.

Remember: Daily standup is for supporting your team, not for reporting to managers.

Asking “what are you working on today?” or going ticket-by-ticket often doesn’t cut it. Instead, try to focus on creating an environment where engineers are comfortable sharing blockers and issues, and focus on getting them the resources they need to keep things moving forward.

Product managers

Product managers focus on the future. They keep a close eye on market trends, have a solid understanding of the end user’s needs, and help prioritize product features and capabilities. 

Because this role is forward-focused, their needs are, too. They tend to focus less on what’s already happened and more on what’s in progress and what still needs to happen.

Product managers can provide business context and help the team keep priorities aligned, so the whole team understands which items to handle first.

Tech leads

Tech leads oversee the development and delivery of a finished product or solution. Their responsibilities overlap somewhat with product managers in that both roles focus on delivering a successful product — which is why these roles work closely together. 

However, whereas product managers are more product-focused (obviously), tech leads have engineering leadership responsibilities in addition to performing technical work themselves. This includes responsibilities like architecture, training, upskilling, project planning, and goal setting/monitoring.

During daily standup, tech leads can level-set progress towards sprint goals (or sprint backlog), organizational changes and improvements, or areas that need focus. Questions for these team members should focus on emergent issues that have the potential to snowball and impact other departments and customers. 🤝

Designers

Designers are critical members of the dev team. They review project requirements and user stories to understand the goals of a particular feature. They research user behavior to inform design decisions. And they collaborate closely with engineers to make sure the final product is consistent with the user experience they designed. 

If your designers aren’t aligned with the rest of the team or feel stuck, blocked, or overwhelmed, your goals and timeline will be at risk. 

Set a time and stick to it

Standup meetings are meant to be short — no longer than 15 minutes. This helps keep the meetings laser-focused 💥 and prevents them from disrupting the team’s productivity. 

If you’re having trouble with your standups running long, it can be helpful to use a timer so that everyone knows how much time they have to speak. Or, incorporate a tool like Spinach so speakers can keep track of how long they’ve been talking.

Ensure proper preparation

Standup questions don’t do a lot of good if no one is prepared to answer them. To ensure a productive meeting, team members need to come prepared to discuss their progress, goals, and potential challenges. Send out an agenda ahead of time — even if you ask similar questions each day. 

With Spinach, you can send automated agendas that allow team members to fill out their discussion points ahead of time, helping keep the meeting on track from the get-go.

Facilitate it with a tool that increases meeting efficiency

When you’ve got less than 15 minutes to work with, efficiency is a must. Thankfully, tools like Spinach can help standup meetings run much more quickly and efficiently while still ensuring every important point is covered.

Spinach is an AI-powered Scrum master that can take notes, generate meeting summaries, record key decisions and action items, and more. This frees everyone on the team up to focus more on what’s being said and less on recording everything that needs recording, leading to more efficient, productive standups.

Problem-solve after the standup

Standups are a great place to bring problems to the team’s attention, but effective problem-solving takes more time and discussion than standups allow. If you get carried away trying to solve problems as they come up, you won’t have time to cover everything else on the meeting agenda. 🗒️

Use Spinach’s Action Items feature to earmark assignments for follow up. This is an automated way to assign tasks to relevant team members based on the standup discussion.