Standup templates for every team: engineering, marketing, support, and hybrid

Diverse team members from different departments collaborating around a shared digital standup board, showing engineers with code, marketers with campaigns, and support staff with tickets The classic three questions work for Scrum teams. They fall flat everywhere else. "What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Any blockers?" assumes everyone's work fits neatly into daily increments with clear dependencies. Marketing campaigns don't work that way. Support queues definitely don't. And hybrid teams need questions that translate across completely different working styles. This guide has ready-to-use standup templates for how different teams actually work. Copy them, adjust as needed, and stop forcing your team into questions that don't fit.

Why generic standup templates fail

The standard scrum standup was designed for software teams working in sprints on shared codebases. The questions assume:

Work items complete in a day or two
Blockers are technical dependencies
Everyone understands what "done" means
Progress is measurable in tasks completed

For a marketing manager running a quarter-long campaign, "what did you do yesterday" becomes a meaningless exercise. For a support lead handling tickets, blockers aren't about waiting on someone else; they're about volume and complexity.

One size fits nobody

Teams that force-fit generic standup questions end up with two problems: meaningless updates that waste everyone's time, and missed signals because the questions don't surface what actually matters.

Engineering team standup templates

Engineering standups need to surface blockers quickly and keep sprint work visible. The challenge is avoiding status theater while getting useful information.

Standard engineering standup

Use this for teams working in sprints with clear backlogs:

Question	Purpose
What did you ship or complete since last standup?	Focus on outputs, not activity
What are you working on today?	Identify potential parallel work
What's blocking you or slowing you down?	Surface dependencies early
Do you need help from anyone on the team?	Open door for pairing

Ship, not did

Notice the first question asks what you "shipped or completed," not what you "worked on." This subtle shift keeps updates focused on outcomes and prevents status updates that list meetings attended.

Backend/infrastructure engineering

For teams dealing with ops, deployments, and system health:

Question	Purpose
Any incidents or alerts since last standup?	Surface operational issues first
What infrastructure work did you complete?	Track progress on longer projects
What's your focus today?	Coordinate on shared systems
Any concerns about upcoming deploys or changes?	Identify risk early

Frontend/product engineering

For teams working closely with design and product:

Question	Purpose
What features or fixes did you complete?	Track user-facing progress
What are you building today?	Coordinate with design reviews
Any design questions or product clarifications needed?	Surface cross-functional dependencies
What's blocking your progress?	Standard blocker check

Engineering team dashboard showing code commits, pull requests, and sprint progress metrics alongside individual standup updates

Full-stack/small team engineering

For startups and small teams where everyone wears multiple hats:

Question	Purpose
What did you finish since last standup?	Keep updates outcome-focused
What's the most important thing you're tackling today?	Force prioritization
Where might you need a second pair of eyes?	Opens door for review or pairing
Anything on fire that the team should know about?	Catch urgent issues

When to skip the standup

If your entire engineering team is heads-down on a single critical feature, sometimes the best standup is no standup. Async tools let you check in without interrupting flow state. Use standups for coordination, not compliance.

Marketing team standup templates

Marketing work operates on different timescales. Campaigns run for weeks or months. Results lag behind activity. Daily task completion matters less than progress toward goals.

Campaign-focused marketing

For teams running ongoing marketing campaigns:

Question	Purpose
What campaign work moved forward since last standup?	Track incremental progress
What metrics are you watching today?	Keep data-driven focus
What content or assets are you creating?	Coordinate creative work
Any dependencies on other teams or external vendors?	Surface cross-functional needs

Content marketing

For teams focused on content creation and distribution:

Question	Purpose
What content did you publish or complete?	Track output
What are you writing or creating today?	Coordinate editorial calendar
Any research or interviews you need to schedule?	Plan ahead
What's performing well that we should double down on?	Share insights

Set weekly themes

Instead of daily task lists, marketing standups work better with weekly themes. "This week is about Q1 campaign launch prep" gives context to daily updates.

Track leading indicators

Ask about activities that predict results: emails drafted, ads created, content scheduled. These show progress before metrics move.

Share learnings

Marketing generates constant data. Standups should surface what's working, not just what's being done.

Growth/performance marketing

For teams running paid acquisition and optimization:

Question	Purpose
Any significant changes in campaign performance?	Surface anomalies quickly
What experiments are you running or launching?	Track testing velocity
What optimizations are you making today?	Share tactical improvements
Budget or approval needs?	Flag blockers early

Marketing dashboard showing campaign metrics, content calendar, and social media performance alongside team standup updates

Support team standup templates

Support teams deal with unpredictable volume and emotionally demanding work. Standups need to surface capacity issues and share knowledge, not track individual tasks.

Customer support/success

For teams handling inbound tickets and customer relationships:

Question	Purpose
What's your queue looking like?	Surface capacity issues
Any escalations or tricky cases to discuss?	Share knowledge and get help
Patterns you're seeing in customer issues?	Identify systemic problems
How are you doing?	Check on team wellbeing

Don't track tickets per person

Support standups should never become a competition for who closed the most tickets. This creates perverse incentives to cherry-pick easy issues and avoid complex ones.

Technical support

For teams handling product and technical issues:

Question	Purpose
Any critical issues or outages affecting customers?	Surface urgent problems
What complex cases are you working through?	Share technical knowledge
Documentation or process improvements needed?	Capture systemic fixes
Anything you need from engineering?	Bridge support-engineering gap

Success/account management

For teams managing ongoing customer relationships:

Question	Purpose
Any accounts at risk or needing attention?	Flag churn signals
Customer wins to celebrate?	Share positive momentum
Upcoming renewals or expansion conversations?	Coordinate on revenue
What's one thing that would help your accounts succeed?	Surface feature requests and needs

💚Wellbeing check

Support work is emotionally draining. Adding a simple "how are you doing?" normalizes talking about capacity and stress before burnout hits.

🔍Pattern recognition

Support teams see product problems first. Standups should capture recurring issues that engineering and product need to know about.

📚Knowledge sharing

Complex cases solved yesterday help the whole team today. Build in time for sharing solutions.

⬆️Escalation paths

Make it easy to flag issues that need leadership attention without making people feel like they're failing.

Hybrid team standup templates

Cross-functional teams have a harder problem: questions need to translate across completely different types of work. A designer's "blocker" looks nothing like an engineer's.

Product squad (engineering + design + product)

For cross-functional product teams:

Question	Purpose
What shipped or moved to the next stage?	Track work across disciplines
What's your focus today?	Coordinate handoffs
Where do you need input from another discipline?	Get help across roles
Any risks to our sprint/cycle goals?	Keep everyone aligned on delivery

Cross-functional product team with designers, engineers, and product managers viewing a shared sprint board with different types of work items

Agency team (creatives + account + strategy)

For teams managing client work:

Question	Purpose
Client deliverables completed or in review?	Track external-facing work
What's in production today?	Coordinate creative work
Any client feedback or scope changes?	Share intelligence
Resource needs or timeline concerns?	Flag capacity issues

Startup team (everyone does everything)

For small teams where roles overlap:

Question	Purpose
What's the most important thing you accomplished?	Focus on impact
What's your one priority today?	Force ruthless prioritization
What do you wish you had help with?	Opens door for teamwork
What's one thing you learned?	Build shared knowledge

Rotate question owner

In hybrid teams, let different disciplines take turns designing the standup questions for a week. An engineer's perspective on what matters differs from a designer's, and both are valuable.

Remote and async standup adaptations

All these templates work for both synchronous and asynchronous standups, but async requires a few adjustments.

Making templates async-friendly

Add context that would be obvious in person (project names, ticket links)

Use specific language instead of pronouns ("the checkout flow" not "it")

Include visual evidence when helpful (screenshots, Loom links)

Tag people directly when you need their input

Set clear expectations for response time on blockers

Timezone-distributed teams

For teams spanning multiple timezones:

Question	Purpose
What did you complete in your last working day?	Accounts for different schedules
What's your main focus for your next working day?	Plans across timezone gaps
Anything the other timezone needs to know?	Enables handoff
Where do you need async input vs. sync discussion?	Respects everyone's time

Customizing templates for your team

These templates are starting points, not prescriptions. Here's how to adapt them:

Start with the template closest to your team type

Don't build from scratch. Pick the template that matches your team's primary function and work from there.

Run it for two weeks unchanged

Resist the urge to customize immediately. Get baseline data on what works and what doesn't.

Ask your team what's missing

After two weeks, ask: "What information do you wish you had from standups that you're not getting?"

Remove questions that generate noise

If a question consistently produces "nothing to report" or copy-paste answers, it's not earning its keep. Cut it.

Add one question at a time

When adding new questions, add one and see how it works before adding more. Standup bloat happens gradually.

Team retrospective discussing standup effectiveness with sticky notes showing what's working and what needs improvement

Implementing your templates in Kollabe

Kollabe's standup tool lets you create custom questions with color coding, required/optional flags, and emoji prefixes. Here's how to set up any of these templates:

Create a new standup or edit an existing one
Open the questions modal
Add your questions in order of priority
Set critical questions as required
Use colors to group related questions (green for accomplishments, yellow for blockers)
Share the standup link with your team

The persistent daily rooms mean team members can submit their updates throughout the day, and AI-generated summaries pull out blockers and patterns automatically.

Templates are just the start

Your standups will change as your team does. Use Kollabe's question customization to experiment with different formats, and check AI summaries to see what patterns show up in your team's updates.

Quick reference: template chooser

Not sure which template to start with? Use this guide:

Your team	Recommended template	Key focus
Sprint-based engineering	Standard engineering	Blockers and dependencies
DevOps/SRE	Backend/infrastructure	Incidents and system health
Frontend product teams	Frontend/product	Design coordination
Small startup engineering	Full-stack small team	Prioritization
Campaign marketers	Campaign-focused	Progress toward goals
Content teams	Content marketing	Editorial coordination
Performance marketing	Growth/performance	Metrics and experiments
Customer support	Customer support/success	Capacity and patterns
Technical support	Technical support	Knowledge sharing
Account management	Success/account management	Relationship health
Product squads	Product squad hybrid	Cross-functional handoffs
Agency teams	Agency hybrid	Client deliverables
Small startups	Startup hybrid	Impact and learning
Distributed teams	Timezone-distributed	Async handoffs

Conclusion

Standup templates should match how your team works, not the other way around. Engineering teams need to surface blockers. Marketing needs to track campaign progress. Support needs to share knowledge and watch capacity. Hybrid teams need questions that work across disciplines. Pick the template that fits your team type, run it for two weeks, then customize based on what you learn. If you're tired of standup meetings that don't match your workflow, try Kollabe's async standups with customizable questions.

Three to four questions works best. Fewer than three often misses important information; more than four creates fatigue and rushed answers. If you need more questions, consider whether some could be weekly check-ins instead of daily.

Make questions about blockers and risks required. Questions about wins, learnings, or wellbeing can be optional. People should always be able to flag problems; celebrating wins shouldn't feel mandatory.

One to three sentences per question is ideal. If answers regularly run longer, either the questions are too broad or team members need coaching on concise communication. Async standups help here because people can read faster than they can listen.

Yes, but async standups benefit from slightly more context in answers since you can't ask clarifying questions in real time. The questions themselves can stay the same; it's the expected answer depth that shifts.

Review your questions quarterly or when team structure changes significantly. If questions consistently produce unhelpful answers, change them sooner. Avoid changing questions just because they feel stale; consistency has value too.

Last Updated on 02/02/2026