How to Run a Productive Daily Standup Meeting (Free Templates)

In this post, we're looking at the daily standup, the short morning meeting where a team lines up what happened yesterday, what's happening today, and any blockers that have come up. It's the most frequent meeting most teams have and can often feel like it’s flying by, but even small inefficiencies here compound quickly. Put simply, a standup that drifts five minutes over every day costs a team of eight more than 150 hours of work a year!

You've probably personally sat (or stood) through the version that goes awry. It’s usually some version of: someone gives a full narrative of their day; a pair of people start debugging a problem while the others wait; the manager turns it into a status report; and half an hour later no one has gotten anything done. The fix is usually just a clearer structure and a shared understanding of what the meeting is for.

In this article we'll walk through what a daily standup is, what it's meant to produce, when and how long to run it, and who does what. Then we'll go through a free daily standup meeting template question by question.

TL;DR: A daily standup is a 15-minute (or shorter!) daily check-in where each person says what they did yesterday, what they'll do today, and what's blocking them, so the team can adjust its plan for the day and everyone remains productive. Keep it to the same time and place, take anything longer than a sentence or two offline, and judge it by whether people leave knowing what to do next. A free daily standup template for Knowtworthy, Word, Excel and Google Docs is further down.

What is a Daily Standup Meeting?

A daily standup is a short, recurring team meeting, usually held at the start of the working day, where each team member briefly answers three questions: what they did yesterday, what they'll work on today, and whether anything is blocking them. It gets its name from the habit of holding it standing up, which is a deliberately uncomfortable way of holding a meeting, thereby keeping it short. If at some point your team is tired of standing during the meeting, that’s one way to know you’ve gone too far over time.

The standup comes out of agile software development, where it's formally called the Daily Scrum. The 2020 Scrum Guide describes it as "a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team" whose purpose is "to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary." You'll also see it called a daily huddle or a morning check-in, and the format has spread well beyond software to marketing, operations, support and agency teams — basically any team working at any sort of daily cadence.

It used to be the case that there were three questions written into the Scrum Guide itself:

1. "What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?"
2. "What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?"
3. "Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?"

However, a more modern approach encourages teams to "select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work." The three questions above, and the ones we’ll discuss below, are still the most common structure because they work. However, if you don’t feel they work effectively enough, you can modify them as needed for your own team.

What is the main goal of a Daily Standup Meeting?

The goal is for everyone to leave with a clear plan for the day and for blockers to be visible to the people who can remove them. The Scrum Guide states plainly: daily standups "improve communications, identify impediments, promote quick decision-making, and consequently eliminate the need for other meetings."

That last clause is the useful test. A good standup should replace a dozen "quick question" interruptions and the weekly "where are we on this?" thread. If your team still does these anyway, you should revisit whether or not your standups are actually effective. Ideally, meeting once a day for 5-15 minutes allows you to actually focus on your work throughout the week, saving more than 5-15 minutes per day in interruptions.

Two things regularly pull standups off course, though: turning the quick meeting into a status report to a manager, and trying to solve the problem someone just raised. Atlassian's guide to standups makes the point that they "aren't about inflating egos or justifying job descriptions," and adds that a blocker shouldn't wait for the standup at all: if you're stuck at 2pm, ask for help at 2pm. However, to our earlier point, do try and be mindful of everyone else’s time: if something can be mentioned in the standup that everyone needs to hear, it should be.

A study of 102 standups across 15 teams in five countries, published in IEEE Software, found that only about a third of meeting time went to the three questions, and nearly as much went to problem-solving discussion. It’s often the case that engineering teams will descend into discussing solutions when met with a problem, but one of the core principles of a successful standup is to surface a problem in front of everyone who is able to help fix it, and then to take that problem offline with only those that should actually be involved. For example, in a software engineering context, if your full-stack team is dealing with a blocker on the backend, the frontend engineers and UI/UX designers don’t need to be present listening to the backend engineers discuss their ideas for a fix. As with every good meeting, keep discussions scoped appropriately.

When should you schedule a Daily Standup Meeting?

Hold it at the same time and place every working day, and put it early enough that the day's plan can still change. The Scrum Guide's reason for the fixed slot is that it reduces complexity: nobody has to look up when the meeting is, and nobody can schedule over it.

Morning is the default because that's when "what will I work on today" is still open. If people arrive at different times, though, a 9:00 standup either waits for stragglers or runs without them, and both erode the habit. Pick a time everyone can reliably make, even if that's 9:30 or 10:00. This allows for some flexibility in the team’s arrival times, but also gives people a few minutes to get their thoughts together after arriving at work before the standup begins, allowing them to arrive more prepared.

One pitfall with standups we’ve seen, however, is when you schedule them midmorning or too late in the day. The time in the workday before a standup can feel like a bit of a lull - tasks for the day haven’t necessarily been defined yet and it is hard to want to sit down and focus when you know you’ll be interrupted soon. So a good rule of thumb is to try and run the standup within the first hour of the work day, whenever that may be for your team.

Notably, this advice isn’t one-size-fits-all either. One of the IEEE Software study's four recommendations is to consider holding the standup right before lunch instead: a mid-morning meeting breaks up the most productive stretch of the day, whereas a pre-lunch standup ends at a natural break. It isn't the standard advice, but if your team's mornings are its best hours or there are too many scheduling issues, it's worth a try.

Should it be every day? For most small teams doing interdependent work, yes. The same study suggests adapting the frequency to the team, and three people who sit together and talk all day may find three standups a week carry the same information. What you shouldn't do is let "daily" become "whenever," because the value comes from the habit. Similarly, if you really don’t think daily is the best option, don’t force that structure upon the team. We have a separate article about scheduling meetings only when they're needed.

How long should a Daily Standup Meeting be?

Fifteen minutes is the ceiling, and most standups should be shorter. The Scrum Guide sets 15 minutes as the timebox regardless of team size. In practice, the IEEE Software study measured an average of 11.7 minutes across the meetings it observed, with a range from 4 to 24. Our template description suggests about ten minutes, which is a good target for a team of five to eight. You should, of course, adapt this to your team. If there are only three of you at a standup, there’s no reason to stand around for 15 minutes every day.

A useful rule of thumb is one to two minutes per person. If that math gives you more than 15 minutes, the meeting has too many people in it and you should look into running separate, more focused standups. A 2017 survey of developers that the study cites found a marked drop in satisfaction once a team went past 12 members, which matches anecdotally what most of us have felt: past a dozen, you're listening to updates that have nothing to do with your work.

We can recommend three habits to keep your standups short without needing to resort to actual timekeeping.

• Prepare before you walk in. Glance at your board or yesterday's notes so your answers are ready. Overruns can often come from people composing their update out loud.
• Take it offline. When two people start solving something, one of them says "let's take that offline" and they pick it up right after. Jason Yip's patterns for daily standups suggests a simple, consistent phrase for exactly this so nobody has to feel rude. This phrase in particular may seem repetitive and can feel over-used, but it’s an important way of protecting everyone else’s time.
• Signal the end. Close with the same line every day so the meeting has a clear finish and people don't drift into side conversations. Something as simple as "That's everyone, thanks. Anything we took offline, grab each other now" does the job. We’ve even seen everyone clap simultaneously at the end of a standup before getting to work, so this is really a case of whatever works for you.

If the standup consistently runs long anyway, time it for a week and share the numbers with your team. Making the overrun visible tends to fix it faster than any rule does.

How is a Daily Standup Meeting Run?

Under Scrum, the standup belongs to the people doing the work. The Scrum Guide is explicit that it's an event "for the Developers," and that if the Product Owner or Scrum Master are actively working on items in the sprint, "they participate as Developers." A manager can attend, but a standup where every answer is directed at one person is just a report. There’s a time and place for progress reports, but unless there’s a business purpose for daily continuous reports (and there rarely is), don’t turn your standups into one.

Beyond that, someone needs to keep it moving: start on time, keep the order going, call "take it offline" when needed, and end it. Many teams give this to the Scrum Master or team lead by default. Perhaps interestingly, two of the IEEE Software study's recommendations push the other way: rotate the facilitator so the meeting stays the team's, and consider dropping the "yesterday" question, because they found that it took up more time than either of the other questions while being the one people least wanted to spend time on. You may also feel some redundancy with this question sometimes when tasks take multiple days to complete. You don't have to go that far, but it's a good sign of where the value sits: in today's plan and today's blockers.

There are two common ways to run the round itself:

1. Person by person. Each team member answers the three questions in turn. Simple, predictable, and the format the template below follows. Works well when the work is largely individual.
2. Walk the board. You go across the task board instead, usually from the "nearly done" column backwards, and talk about each piece of work in flight. This keeps attention on what's closest to finishing and suits teams with a lot of shared or handed-off work.

Whichever you use, capture what comes out of it. Blockers need an owner and a next step, and decisions made in a standup are the easiest ones in the week to lose because nobody thinks of a ten-minute meeting as something that needs notes. Our post on what goes into a great meeting action item covers how to phrase them so they're still useful later on. In short, the notes themselves should be quick but precise for this kind of meeting.

Finally, think back to your last few standups. Did anyone say the word "blocked," and if so, did something happen about it the same day? If not, that's the first thing to fix, because a standup where blockers are announced and then ignored teaches people to stop raising them.

Additional Resources about Daily Standup Meetings

• The 2020 Scrum Guide, the primary source for the Daily Scrum's purpose, timebox and participants.
• Daily Stand-Up Meetings: Start Breaking the Rules, Stray, Moe and Sjøberg's IEEE Software study of 102 standups, and the source of the recommendations above.
• What is a stand up meeting and tips to run one, Atlassian's practical guide, including advice for distributed teams.
• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings, Jason Yip's catalogue of patterns, from "walk the board" to "signal the end."
• Our own guide to writing an effective meeting agenda, for the longer meetings the standup should be saving you from.

A Simple Template for Daily Standup Meetings

You should always adapt any meeting template to your particular needs, but below we have some free templates for you to get started with. Every team is different, which is what makes running great meetings a challenge, but meeting best practices often stay the same for different meeting types.

We'll go over every section in the templates attached in this article, so feel free to follow along with whichever version below suits you.

• Free Knowtworthy Daily Standup Template: https://knowtworthy.com/templates/665e5810e05fa9cd9ae4a20c/
• Microsoft Word Daily Standup Template: https://templates.knowtworthy.com/production/templates/665e580fe05fa9cd9ae4a209/6b15a1e8eb1af18aec3211bb8e25a296
• Microsoft Excel Daily Standup Template: https://templates.knowtworthy.com/production/templates/665e580fe05fa9cd9ae4a209/a5762aafc7bfe45a374e22bdca2549fc
• Google Docs Daily Standup Template: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X3Ci-rPtExR6EkbA9iGK1N4QnWjWrF5n/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=114292313754172363182&rtpof=true&sd=true

The Knowtworthy version opens as a free live meeting document with no account needed, which suits a standup well: the same link every morning, everyone's answers in one place. If you don’t want to make an account and organization, add the meeting's free link to the recurring calendar event, and you can open past notes from there whenever you need them. The Excel version is handy if you'd rather keep a running grid of days and people, and the Word and Google Docs versions suit teams who want a simple page to fill in and share.

If these templates don't suit your needs, you can check out our dedicated templates page where you can access all of our free templates and find one that works better for you!

Meeting Information

At the top of the template, list a few basics so anyone opening it later can tell what it's for at a glance: the team name, the date, and who was (or is usually) there. Naming the team in the title ("Platform team standup, 22 Sep") is quick and easy and you probably don’t want to end up with a pile of notes all called “Daily Standup”.

There's no purpose line in this template as the purpose of a standup doesn't change from day to day. You also don’t need to fill out a meeting purpose every day either. If you want a reminder of what the meeting is for, the template's own description is a good one: keep everyone on the same page, surface blockers, and don't try to diagnose major issues in the room.

Meeting Agenda

The agenda is one item: go around the team, one person at a time, and have each person answer the three questions. Here's what each one is doing, and what a good answer looks like.

1. What did I do yesterday?

This is the context question. A good answer is one or two lines that connect to something the team cares about ("finished the export bug, it's in review") rather than a list of everything you touched.

2. What will I work on today?

This is the planning question and the one that makes the meeting worth having. Be specific enough that a teammate could tell whether your plan overlaps with theirs: "the export bug" is less useful than "getting the export bug through review, then starting the invoice PDF." This is the team’s pulse, so be precise here when possible.

3. What issues are blocking my work?

This is the reason the whole team is in the room. "Blocked" means you cannot make progress without something from someone else: an answer, a review, an access request, a decision. Name the blocker and, if you can, who could unblock it. The facilitator should be paying attention here and make sure each blocker leaves the meeting with an owner.

One thing to watch for: a team that never reports blockers usually has them and isn't saying, often because raising one last week led nowhere. See our points about this above.

Adding structure for larger or newer teams

If the bare three questions feel thin for your team, the Detailed Daily Standup Template adds a short team-lead section at the start (announcements, the main projects and deliverables for the week) and one closing question for the group: how much closer are we today to this week's goal, and do we need to course-correct? That closing question keeps the standup pointed at the sprint goal rather than at individual to-do lists, which is what the Scrum Guide says it's for. There are also variants for developers and marketing teams.

Other templates you might find useful

A standup rarely exists on its own, and two neighbouring meetings tend to come up alongside it:

• The Weekly Sprint Meeting Template, for the planning meeting that decides what the standups are checking progress against.
• The Retrospective Meeting Template, for the meeting where you fix the standup itself if it has stopped working.

After the Meeting

The final thing to do once the meeting ends is store your notes somewhere safe and share them with your team, so that everyone can look back on what happened instead of asking around about outcomes. For a standup, the notes are short, but they're the record of who said they were blocked on what, and that's the thing you'll want to check later down the line. We have a separate post on the best practices for handling your meeting notes afterwards, which you can read here: So you took notes during your meeting, now what?

You can use these notes to bring in people who couldn't make the meeting, or new team members who want to get a quick picture of what the team is working on this week. A week of standup notes is one of the fastest ways to get a new hire oriented.

Depending on how you write your notes, you may need to share them over email, or by using a cloud-based meeting platform like Knowtworthy you can share links to your notes directly instead of keeping people up to date manually.

In this post we covered the basics of daily standup meetings and went through a simple template to get you started. As we mentioned above, there's no one-size-fits-all meeting template, and different types of meetings need different kinds of templates.

So if you're interested in other free meeting templates, check out the list of articles we've written on the subject here: meeting template articles. We also host a blog all about meeting and project management best practices, which you can find here: the Knowtworthy blog.

We'll be back with more articles like this one soon, so if you found this one helpful, please feel free to subscribe or share the post!