Standup Questions Every Team Will Answer

Standups aren't only for your developers. Your marketing, sales, support, and ops people move work forward every day too, and they need a way to share it without another meeting. Standup Alice can run a standup for every one of those teams.

The last thing anyone needs is another meeting. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found employees are interrupted every two minutes during core work hours, 275 times a day, by meetings, emails, or chats. A written standup that each person answers on their own time adds information without adding one more interruption.

The catch is the questions.

Almost every standup tool ships with the same three standup questions. What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Is anything blocking you?

Those questions come from software teams running Scrum. Even Scrum has moved past them: the 2020 Scrum Guide dropped the three questions and now says the team can "select whatever structure and techniques they want" for the Daily Scrum. The questions survived anyway in most standup tools, and they still work for engineering because engineering work arrives in tickets. A ticket has a status, it moves across a board, and "yesterday I finished the login bug" is a complete, useful sentence.

Now ask the same questions of your marketing manager. "Yesterday I worked on the campaign. Today I'm working on the campaign." Ask a seller and you get a list of calls. Every word is true, and the team learns nothing.

The format works fine. It was just built around a kind of work most of your company doesn't do.

What the default standup questions miss

Engineering progress is visible in the work itself. Code ships or it doesn't.

Most other work moves forward through approvals and other people. A campaign stalls because legal hasn't signed off on the copy. A deal stalls because the buyer's finance team went quiet.

A better question for these teams is "what moved, and what's waiting on someone?"

Below are standup questions for four teams. Use them as written or as a starting point. Each one keeps the standup to three questions or fewer, because a standup that takes ten minutes to fill out stops getting filled out.

Standup questions for every team

Standup questions for marketing

Marketing work runs on deadlines that other people control, like a launch date or a review cycle.

• What went live or out for review since your last update?

• What's due this week, and is it on track?

• Who are you waiting on for approval or assets?

The third question does most of the work. Marketing blockers are almost always a person, and naming that person in a channel the whole team reads tends to clear them faster than a direct message does.

Standup questions for sales

Sellers resist standups more than anyone, usually because the standup duplicates what's already in the CRM. Don't ask for pipeline numbers. Ask for what the CRM can't tell you.

• Which deal moved, and what moved it?

• Which deal is stuck, and what would unstick it?

• What do you need from someone outside sales this week?

That last question is where the standup earns its place. A seller who needs a security questionnaire from engineering or a custom quote from finance can ask once, in public, instead of chasing three people separately.

Standup questions for customer support

Support already measures volume, so a standup asking "how many tickets did you close?" is redundant. The standup is the place for patterns a dashboard won't show.

• What did customers ask about more than usual?

• Is there a ticket you need help with or want to escalate?

• Anything the product or sales team should hear about?

Run this one at the end of the day instead of the start. Support learns the most during the shift, and an end-of-day summary gives product and sales something useful to read the next morning.

Standup questions for operations and finance

Ops and finance work in cycles: month-end close, payroll, renewals, audits. Most days are routine. A good standup for these teams stays out of the way until something isn't.

• What's due before the next cycle closes?

• What are you waiting on from another team?

Two questions is enough. If your ops team answers "nothing waiting" four days out of five, the standup is working. The fifth day is the reason it exists.

Give each team its own standup

Coordination between teams is where most companies struggle. In Atlassian's State of Teams 2026 report, a survey of more than 12,000 knowledge workers, 87% said that with everyone in execution mode, they lack the time or capacity to coordinate. A standup that each team actually fills out is one of the cheapest fixes available.

The mistake most companies make is running one standup format for everyone. The engineering questions get applied to the whole org, the other teams find them pointless, and participation fades outside of dev.

Standup Alice lets you set up separate teams inside one organization, each with its own questions and its own channel. Marketing gets the marketing questions at the time that suits marketing. Sales gets theirs. The summaries post to each team's channel, and they can also go out by email for the people who don't spend their day in Slack or Teams.

If a manager needs to see across teams, send each team's summary to their channel and to that manager's inbox. Nobody has to join a meeting, and nobody has to fill out a form written for someone else's job.

Start with one team

You don't need to roll this out across the company. Pick the team most likely to say "standups aren't for us," give them the questions above, and run it for two weeks. If the summaries start answering questions people used to ask in DMs, you'll know it's working.

Try Standup Alice free and set up a standup for a team that's never had one.