Daily standup questions that actually work

The three standard daily standup questions are: what did you do, what will you do next, and what's blocking you? They endure because they cover exactly what a team needs — recent progress, near-term plan, and anything stuck — in under a minute per person. The problem is rarely the questions; it's that answers drift into vague status theatre. Here's how to ask them so they stay useful, especially async.

The three questions worth asking

• What did you ship yesterday? — outcomes, not activity ('merged the payments retry fix', not 'worked on payments').
• What are you focused on today? — one or two concrete things, tied to a ticket.
• Anything blocking you? — the most important one; make it easy to answer honestly.

Questions to drop

Skip 'how do you feel about the sprint?' and open-ended culture prompts in the daily — they belong in retros or 1:1s, not a 30-second check-in. Skip anything that rewards long answers; length is not signal. And never turn standup answers into a productivity scoreboard — the moment people feel graded, the answers become defensive and useless.

Make the answers truthful, not typed from memory

People forget half of what they did by end of day, so self-reported answers miss real work. Grounding standup in actual commits, PRs and tickets fixes that: the 'what did you ship' answer can be drafted from real activity, leaving the person to add context (calls, QA, blockers) rather than reconstruct their day.

truelo pulls the activity and drafts the update, so the standup questions get honest answers in seconds.