Standup Meeting Notes Template
A standup template that respects the point of a standup
The standup exists to do one thing: surface blockers while there is still time in the day to fix them. Everything else — progress reporting, problem-solving, status for managers — is a different meeting wearing a standup's clothes. So this template is deliberately the shortest one in our library. If your standup notes take more than a few minutes to produce, the standup itself is probably broken, not the notes.
There are exactly three fields per person. Resist adding a fourth.
The standup notes template (copy and paste)
Blank template
# Standup — [Team name] — [Date] ## [Name] - **Yesterday:** - **Today:** - **Blockers:** ## [Name] - **Yesterday:** - **Today:** - **Blockers:** ## Blockers needing follow-up | Blocker | Owner of the fix | Raised by | Follow-up when | |---------|------------------|-----------|----------------|
For async standups (Slack, a shared doc, a standup tool), each person posts just their three lines; the follow-up table is compiled by whoever runs the channel that day.
Example: the template filled in
A five-person platform team, Tuesday morning. Note how short each entry is — one line per field, and anything longer has been pushed to a follow-up.
Filled example
# Standup — Platform Team — Tue Oct 21 ## Sam - **Yesterday:** Finished the staging migration; load test running. - **Today:** Review load test results; start the API versioning spike. - **Blockers:** None. ## Elena - **Yesterday:** Checkout error states — all five screens done. - **Today:** Handoff with Marcus on empty-cart flow. - **Blockers:** Waiting on final pricing copy from PM (asked Mon). ## Marcus - **Yesterday:** Support rota draft for launch week. - **Today:** Ticket triage automation rules. - **Blockers:** Need staging access for the support sandbox — IT ticket #4417, open 3 days. ## Priya - **Yesterday:** Launch date change comms sent to beta teams. - **Today:** Pricing page review with Elena; vendor contract chase. - **Blockers:** Legal hasn't returned the vendor contract (5 days). ## Tom - **Yesterday:** Fixed the flaky payment test — root cause was a shared fixture. - **Today:** Backfill monitoring for the new checkout events. - **Blockers:** None. ## Blockers needing follow-up | Blocker | Owner of the fix | Raised by | Follow-up when | |---------|------------------|-----------|----------------| | Pricing copy pending | Priya (chasing PM) | Elena | Wed standup | | Support sandbox access, ticket #4417 | Marcus (chasing IT) | Marcus | Thu standup | | Vendor contract with legal | Priya | Priya | Fri standup |
The two things worth copying from this example: blockers name the fix owner and a check-back date (a blocker without either is just a complaint read aloud), and two of the three blockers are other teams' queues — that's normal, and exactly why they belong in writing.
Rules that keep standups short
- One line per field. If "yesterday" needs a paragraph, it wasn't an update, it's a report — link the doc or the PR instead of narrating it.
- Blockers get discussed after, not during. The standup identifies the blocker and the people who'll fix it; those people stay for five minutes after. Everyone else leaves. This single rule is what separates 12-minute standups from 40-minute ones.
- Async-first teams: write it, don't say it. For distributed teams, a written standup in a channel beats a call across five time zones. Same three fields, posted by a set hour, read in two minutes. Keep a short weekly sync for the human contact instead.
- Rotate who compiles the follow-up table. It spreads the (small) cost and makes everyone read the blockers once a week instead of tuning out.
- Kill the standup that becomes status theater. If nobody has had a real blocker in weeks and the team works from the same board, you may not need a daily standup at all — a twice-weekly one plus the written async version usually covers it.
How an AI note taker fits a standup
Honestly: a well-run standup barely needs one, and that's fine. Where recording helps is the messy reality — hybrid teams where half the standup is on a call and half in the room, or standups that double as the day's only coordination point. With CoHear, someone records on their iPhone — no bot joins the call, and the room side is captured too — and the transcript sorts itself into who said what, so the blockers table can be compiled from the recording instead of from memory. For a 15-minute standup, the summary comes back in seconds, and the verbatim quotes with timestamps settle the occasional "I said the review was Thursday" dispute without anyone replaying a whole call.
The more common use: if your team runs async written standups, skip recording entirely and use the template above. Save the AI for the meetings where things actually get decided — the weekly team meeting is the usual candidate. For other formats, see the general meeting notes template.
FAQ
What are the three standup questions?
What did you do yesterday (or since the last standup), what will you do today, and is anything blocking you. The wording varies — some teams use "done / doing / blocked" — but the structure is always the same three fields, and the third is the one that justifies the meeting. If a standup regularly produces no blockers and no coordination, it's a ritual, not a tool.
How do I run an async standup?
Each person posts the same three fields in a shared channel or doc by an agreed time. Someone (rotating) scans for blockers, tags the people who can fix them, and compiles the follow-up table. Async standups fail in one predictable way: blockers posted and never picked up. The follow-up table with a check-back date is the fix — it makes dropped blockers visible the next day.
How long should standup notes be?
Short enough to read in under two minutes for the whole team — roughly one line per person per field, plus the blockers table. Standup notes are a coordination tool, not an archive. Anything that needs detail (a design debate, an incident) gets its own doc, linked from the note.
Who should take standup notes?
Nobody full-time — that's the point of the format. Each person writes or speaks their own three lines; one rotating person compiles blockers. If a manager is transcribing everyone's updates into a status report, the standup has quietly become a reporting meeting, and it's worth asking whether the report should exist separately instead.
