Most async standups fail the same way: three prompts, posted at 9am, answered in a thread nobody reads by Friday. The format isn’t hard to copy — it’s hard to make stick. Here’s the version we’ve seen survive, plus the step where it stops depending on memory at all.
The template
Keep it to five prompts. More than five and people write novels or nothing.
1. Shipped since last update: merged PRs, deployed things, closed tasks. Links, not descriptions. 2. In flight: what you’ll finish next, in one line. 3. Blocked on: a person, a review, a decision — named, or “nothing.” 4. Needs eyes: the PR or doc you want feedback on today, with a deadline. 5. Context worth knowing: one line max. Renamed a table, flaky test quarantined, out at 2pm.
Rules that matter more than the prompts:
- Links beat prose. If “shipped” doesn’t contain a URL, it didn’t happen — or it’s about to be relitigated in the thread.
- Prompt 4 is the load-bearing one. “Needs eyes” is what replaces the tap on the shoulder. Without it, async teams discover review requests two days late.
- Reply in-thread only for blockers. Everything else gets a reaction emoji. Threads that sprawl are how async standups become the meeting they replaced.
- Write it when you start work, not at a fixed hour. Fixed hours recreate the meeting’s context-switch with extra steps.
Where it still breaks
Even done well, the template has a soft underbelly: prompts 1 and 2 ask people to remember and transcribe. Memory is optimistic. Transcription is the first thing dropped on a busy day, and once two people skip, the thread is fiction with timestamps.
The fix is to let the artifacts answer first. When commits, PRs, and CI are already visible next to the tasks, the standup shrinks to the parts a machine can’t say: the blocker with a name on it, the judgment call, the “heads up.” Most days that’s three lines total.
The self-writing version
This is the workflow Kahoona is built for: it streams your GitHub activity onto the board next to your tasks, so “shipped” and “in flight” are already filled in from reality. The human update becomes commentary on the record instead of the record itself. We wrote up the full system in how to run async standups from your GitHub activity.
👉 Let the repo write your standup — free to start
Related: Standup is a latency problem · Why commits belong next to tasks