What to Say in Standup Meetings: 10 Rules for Better Updates

An essential daily standup skill to master is knowing what to say and what not to say. For many agile teams, the daily standup meeting is used to inspect progress, identify issues, and make minor changes to your plans. 

But too often it turns into an occasion for intricate problem-solving, long-winded discussions, status reports, or on-the-spot action.

To know what to say in standup meetings, keep these 10 simple principles in mind:

👩🏾‍🎓 Check out our Daily standups hub for all our resources on running better standup meetings.

If you want to remember just one item from this list, let this be your golden rule for daily standups: Only discuss what’s relevant for most attendees.

Most issues with the daily standup – the meeting running over time, people’s minds checking out early – stem from conversations that are only relevant for a few folks. 

Had Blaise Pascal lived today, he might have been a developer writing something similar about daily standups. Keeping them short is an art that takes preparation and practice.

For a great standup update, don’t:

Keep your answers short. Consider carefully what information everyone should hear and what’s better discussed with a few people afterward.

When someone does transgress, all meeting participants should feel comfortable calling a stop to the discussion and proposing to park the topic until after the standup.

In the Scrum methodology, teams run a version of standups called the Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum should focus “on progress toward the Sprint Goal” and produce “an actionable plan for the next day of work,” according to the Scrum Guide. 

These guidelines mean the meeting should focus on topics related to today’s work, roughly tackling:

You don’t literally have to ask these questions, but these prompts reflect what the daily standup should achieve for most teams.

Don’t ignore upcoming due dates because of this rule to focus on the present. A deadline looming next week is a perfectly viable topic to bring up since it might affect what the team should work on today.

Check out 57 Daily Standup Questions for More Engaging Updates if you’re looking for prompts to use in your daily standups.

When something or someone blocks your work, the daily standup is an excellent opportunity to raise the issue. You can get advice, help, or clarify why something is stuck.

Doing so isn’t always easy, especially if someone is the blocker. Here are tips on how to bring up people impediments during the daily standup:

Whichever blocker you report, keep in mind the golden rule: there has to be a reason the entire group must know about it. For example, if you have a broken laptop, you need to talk to IT or your boss, not the standup crowd.

Bring up irrelevant blockers too often, and your standups might look like this.

When you know someone is waiting for something from you, be proactive about mentioning it. Acknowledge during the daily standup that the item is still pending on your to-do list and give a realistic estimate of when you expect to get it done.

Following this rule has several benefits:

Team members should hold each other accountable for getting their work done. So don’t feel bad asking if someone needs help when a task hasn’t been completed.

Achieving accountability as a team is challenging. You need trust and lots of it, so that:

Say someone committed to complete a task by Wednesday. By Thursday, you notice it’s still not done, and they don’t mention anything about it during the standup. In that case, other team members should feel comfortable to inquire what’s going on, regardless of each person’s title or seniority.

Don’t mistake this rule as a free pass to give someone critical feedback in front of their peers. Creating accountability about work items and commitments is necessary during a daily standup. Telling someone they’re underperforming and need to improve should be reserved for one-on-one meetings.

When you find a seemingly unfixable problem that might impact the customer or other teams, mention it during the standup. 

Others can then offer help, take responsibility, or mitigate the issue for their stakeholders and plans. Don’t go into problem-solving mode, though. Schedule a Lean Coffee or similar meeting with a few folks after the daily standup to discuss solutions.

If you’re already planning to resolve the issue yourself, let others know when you’re working on it, any roadblocks you foresee, and when you expect to have it fixed. Don’t go into details about what you’re going to do exactly, how you found and analyzed the problem, and other such intricacies.

And if you’ve found a minor problem that you fixed already or will shortly? Then don’t mention it at all unless it impacts directly on the work of others.

You can and should talk about any required changes to your plan to stay on track for the Sprint Goal. During a Sprint, Scrum allows you to make changes to the Sprint Backlog – which essentially reflects your plan for the Sprint – but not the Sprint Goal.

The daily standup is an ideal moment to check how confident everyone feels about hitting the goal and make course corrections to stay on track. 

For example, you could decide not to include a buggy auto-suggest feature to meet your objective of shipping a search function for your website.What you shouldn’t do during daily standups is to set or discuss new goals and plans. Dropping that search function to build a new chat feature is something you talk about and decide during Sprint Planning.

When you face a challenge and know what help you need but not who can give it, mention it during the daily standup. You’ll have the attention of a handful to a dozen people who might have a solution or someone else in the organization who does.

For example, you might mention that you’re looking for someone who can proofread a short text in French or give a second opinion on a piece of JavaScript code you wrote.

Don’t go into a long-winded issue you’re facing for which you don’t yet know what help you need. In such cases, you can still adhere to this principle, though.

Share during the standup that you’re facing a challenging problem and would like to discuss it with someone after the standup. 

That’s a short and specific request for help that fits standups.

Thankfully, most of us are inclined to offer support to a teammate when they have an issue we can solve. We don’t have to dwell on that aspect of this principle for too long.

What does need attention is that many of us are too nice. 

We offer help even when that jeopardizes our existing commitments and responsibilities. We then later also take the blame or overwork, the result of the fallout of the extra load we took on.

Make sure to highlight what you need to drop or de-prioritize when you offer help while your plate is already full so that someone else can step up and support you.

Daily standups shouldn’t be status updates. But you can share work items you’ve completed when that information might help you or others.

For example, you might share that you’ve fixed all the bugs you’re aware of related to a specific feature. You consider that work done unless someone has found any new problems.

In such a case, your status update serves a purpose: you’re confirming with others whether your work item is truly done so you can move on to the next one.

Nothing! The daily standup meeting is run by the development team for the development team. Product Owners (POs) and other stakeholders say nothing during Daily Scrum meetings 🤫 – unless they’re working on the team as developers or you’re using an alternative project management approach like daily huddles.

The attendance of POs and stakeholders isn’t forbidden, but neither is it helpful. In their presence, a developer might feel uncomfortable following the principles we’ve just discussed and end up where we were at the start of this article: not knowing what to say in a standup meeting.

Remote teams can do their standups manually on Zoom, Slack, or in front of a board. But Parabol’s online standup tool can make your life 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.

Check out our daily standup hub or these other articles that cover different aspects of the art of standups: