"What did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, any blockers?" is the default standup script for a reason — it's simple and it works. But it was written for a co-located engineering team in the early 2000s, and it's a mediocre fit for half the teams that now use it. A product trio, a project team, and a sales pod don't share the same rhythm, so they shouldn't be forced through the same three questions.
Good standup questions do two things: they surface what the group can act on, and they skip what it can't. Below is a better set for each kind of team — and because none of these need to be asked out loud, a note on running them async with a recurring prompt.
The Universal Rule: Optimize for Blockers
Before the team-specific lists, one principle that applies to all of them. The single most valuable thing a standup surfaces is what's stuck. The "what I did" recap is mostly ceremony; the "what I'm doing" is often already known. The blocker is the part that needs the group.
If your standups have gotten long and no one's really listening, try cutting them to the one question that matters — a daily blocker check-in that asks only "is anything blocking you today?" Everything below builds on that instinct: ask what's actionable, cut what isn't.
Engineering Teams
Engineers don't need to hear each other narrate tickets. They need to catch integration problems, shared blockers, and risky work before it lands. Better questions:
- What did you ship or merge since yesterday? (Concrete output, not activity.)
- What are you picking up next, and does it touch anyone else's work? (Surfaces collisions early.)
- Anything blocking you or about to? (The real point.)
For a distributed team, collect these as replies to a recurring prompt rather than in a call. Then use the weekly rituals to zoom out: a weekly retro prompt for keep/drop/change, a sprint planning prep reminder so planning starts with a groomed backlog, and a weekly demo prompt where everyone drops a screenshot of what they built. See more on the engineering teams examples page.
Product Managers
A PM's standup isn't about their own tasks — it's about keeping the trio (product, design, engineering) aligned and unblocking decisions. Ask:
- What shipped, and did it move the metric we care about?
- What's next, and is it still the right priority?
- What needs a decision from someone here? (This is the PM's highest-leverage question.)
The "needs a decision" prompt is the one that saves a week — it surfaces the calls that would otherwise wait for a meeting. Run it as a weekly product update prompt, and keep the backlog decision-ready with a backlog grooming reminder. More on the product managers examples page.
Project Managers
Project teams live and die by dependencies and dates. The standard three questions miss both. Ask instead:
- Is your current task on track for its due date? (Yes / at risk / slipping.)
- Are you waiting on anyone, or is anyone waiting on you? (Dependencies, in both directions.)
- Any new risk since yesterday?
The "waiting on / waited on" framing catches the handoff delays that quietly sink timelines. Collected async, it becomes a living status board without a status meeting.
Sales Teams
A sales standup should move deals, not recite a pipeline everyone can see in the CRM. Ask:
- Which deal are you pushing today, and what's the next step?
- Where are you stuck — a stalled deal, a missing intro, a pricing call?
- Any deal that slipped or needs cover?
Pair the daily nudge with a weekly pipeline prompt that keeps the CRM clean before your forecast meeting, so the numbers you're working from are real.
Leadership & Managers
Managers running standup across a team don't need task detail — they need signal on morale, direction, and where to spend their attention. On a longer cadence, ask:
- What's the one thing you shipped this week? — a weekly team update prompt.
- How did this month feel, and what would make next month better? — a monthly team health check.
These catch drift — in priorities and in morale — long before it shows up in a 1:1 or a resignation.
How to Actually Run These (Without More Meetings)
Every question set above works better written than spoken, for one reason: written answers are async, searchable, and don't cost the whole team a synchronized interruption. The trick is consistency — the prompt has to go out reliably, on the same cadence, without anyone remembering to send it.
That's a recurring email. You write the prompt once, schedule it in Recurrr, and it lands every day (or week, or month) exactly as written. The questions never change, so a single scheduled email runs the ritual for the life of the team — and the fresh content is always in the replies. Browse ready-to-use prompts in the examples section, or read our guide to running async standups over email.