My New Favorite Question for the Daily Standup

A Short Review of the Three Questions (and why I don’t like them)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a long’ish post about why I disliked the Three Questions that are answered during most daily standups. Since writing it, I’ve often shared the link with Scrum masters and others who run such meetings, hoping to get them to reconsider those particular questions.

To recap, the Three Questions are:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What are you doing today?
3. Any roadblocks?

My biggest problem is that the first point is the one most people fixate on, listing everything they did yesterday, sometimes pausing to reflect and make sure they haven’t missed a trivial task, or those few minutes when they took a break to get coffee or tea. Good grief.

I also find that the question about today is again another laundry list of things they think they have to do.

Blockers are easy, but please, for all that’s good in the world, do NOT wait until standup to inform someone you’re blocked! Blockers should be immediately communicated to the team through an ad-hoc call or a message in Teams, Slack, or your preferred chat app!

My New Favorite Question

I recently had the opportunity to run standup for a new team I’ve been leading. Until now, I’ve left that task in the hands of the Scrum master or the PM. On this particular day, the Scrum master was out, so I asked the PM if I could run it. She happily agreed. I told her it was going to be different because I had something new in mind.

I’m leading a great team, but they also do what every other team does, and they faithfully answer the Three Questions, often going into great detail about what they did yesterday, and sort of muddling through what they’re doing today.

We’re also in crunch time with our project (what team isn’t, right?), so I’ve been trying to keep everyone as focused as possible, and that’s when I decided the best question to ask was:

What is the most important thing you’re working on today, and what’s the next step you’re taking to move it forward?

Yeah, yeah…I get it, it’s actually two questions. Two questions getting to the same point: Are you focused on the right thing, and what are you doing to make progress?

I ended with “Anything blocking you?” but could ignore it since I open our team chat almost every morning to ask if anyone is blocked. I want to get those things out of the way as quickly as possible, especially since our standup doesn’t happen until 11 AM Eastern.

In Summary

Priorities shift a lot on this team (and every team I’ve ever been on), and it’s important that team members understand them. Using these questions is a good way to adjust and make sure everyone is moving toward the same point. If Developer A says, “The most important thing I’m working on today is X”, but it should be Y, it’s easy to correct them or ask for justification on why they believe X is more important.

What do you think? Is it a good question or a bad one?

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