Daily Standup

Timebox: 15 minutes, hard stop. Who: the people doing the work. Owner: the team, not the manager.

The three questions

1. What did I finish yesterday that moves the sprint goal forward?
2. What will I finish today?
3. What is in my way?

Output

• Updated board — everyone moves their own cards before the meeting, not during it
• A short list of blockers with an owner and a next step for each

Rules that actually matter

• This is not a status report to a manager. It is the team synchronizing with itself. The moment it becomes reporting upward, people start performing instead of coordinating.
• Yesterday and today. Not last week. A daily ceremony that reviews the week is a weekly meeting that happens too often.
• Blockers get named, not solved. Take the solving offline with the two people who need to be there. This is the single most common reason a 15-minute standup takes 40.
• Tag anything stuck with Blocked so it is visible outside the meeting.

Common failure

Everyone says "still working on the same thing" three days running and nobody asks why. If a task has not moved in two days, it is either bigger than estimated or blocked. Both are worth saying out loud.