57 Daily Standup Questions for More Engaging Updates

Asking a standard set of daily standup questions is good practice. It reduces planning time for the meeting and ensures everyone knows what to expect and prepare.

But sticking to a default pair of prompts day after day puts people on autopilot. They’ll recite boilerplate status updates and stop listening to others while their minds are focused elsewhere.

To keep your daily standups fun and valuable, you need to know the three most-used questions and their purpose but also have an arsenal of alternatives to mix things up when your meetings are about to go stale.

Here’s a quick overview, so you can jump to the section that fits your needs:

👩🏾‍🎓 Check out our Daily Standups Resource Hub for a 101 overview or refresher on standups.

Scrum’s 3 daily standup questions are:

Previous versions of the Scrum Guide before 2020 recommended these three questions to ask during the Daily Scrum. 

The Scrum Guide no longer prescribes the three Daily Scrum questions, but many teams still use them to structure the meeting.

The questions below come in sets, so you can take them to replace Scrum’s standup prompts entirely.

Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of Web3 startup XMTP, recommends a daily wrap-up with the questions above instead of standup. You do it at the end of the day, so your work is still fresh in your mind.

These open questions prevent useless answers that the standard prompts might evoke. They’re also broad and optional, reducing the need for forced responses. Finally, they encourage people to focus only on what others need to know rather than report every task they perform.

Parabol runs a version of the daily wrap-up every week. We call it the Friday Ship and write a public blog about what we achieved for investors and people in our hiring pipeline.

The idea for these daily standup questions comes from Olaf Lewitz, a veteran Agile coach. He suggests altering the three standard Scrum questions to shift focus from individual team members to the Sprint Goal.

To walk the board, you can use the following questions:

These questions require you to all be looking at a Kanban, Sprint, or Scrum board. You start from the board’s right side with the items closest to reaching the Done column. Go over the first two questions to figure out what’s in the way of completing each item, ideally today.

You work your way left until you reach items that the team has just started. Finally, with the third question, you give everyone a chance to speak up about anything they need for the day’s work.

This utilitarian approach doesn’t work for every agile team. It extracts from people which work items they have done and what they’re going to do – no if’s, buts, or other shades of gray.

These questions don’t allow people to go into lengthy debates about blockers. This approach assumes people discuss such issues as soon as they come up throughout the day.

Sticking to these two questions keeps your daily standup functional and short. That benefit can be enough to convince some hard-hitting teams to make the trade-off of losing the softer side of their daily standups.

You can add the following questions to any standup format, use them to replace existing prompts, or drop them in occasionally for variety.

We’ve categorized the questions by themes and goals, so you can quickly find a question that matches your team’s current needs.

These alternative standup questions help you check and make progress by identifying risks and opportunities for improvement.

The following daily standup questions uncover blockers and opportunities for team members to help each other.

Use these prompts to check in on team members’ well-being and improve their state of mind.

Nobody was ever fired for adding some fun to their standups (as far as we know!). These questions lighten up your meeting while revealing something useful about how your team members are doing. Consider dropping them in as icebreaker questions for your standup.

Or try asking an icebreaker from Parabol’s random icebreaker generator.

These alternative inquiries help your team plan and prioritize their work and thinking.

Remote teams can do their standups manually on Zoom, with a standup bot, or in front of a board. But Parabol’s online standup tool can make your life so much easier. Why not try it out? It’s free!

We’ve run through every imaginable approach and tool for asynchronous standups ourselves but found that most:

That’s why we’ve developed our own online standup solution. It saves your entire team time while staying up-to-date. You can share updates on your own time, set a cadence that suits your team, and review updates when you’re ready.

You have two options left when none of these questions work for your team:

The Scrum Guide doesn’t prescribe any questions anymore, and designing, testing, and improving your own prompts is 100% agile. 

Involve the team, use your retrospectives to reflect on your daily standup questions regularly, and off you go to bolder and better standups! 🚀

💡 Check out our Daily standup hub for an overview of all our resources on daily standups.