Standup Update Format

The short update one person gives a team every day — read aloud in a two-minute round or dropped in a channel. Handed a person's raw notes about their day, base models pad it into a narrative: a paragraph recapping what they poked at, blockers softened into "still stuck on the deploy thing", and no clear line between finished and in-progress. A standup that actually moves the team needs the opposite — three fixed, labeled sections, one line each, where the reader can tell in a glance what landed, what is promised for today, and exactly who needs to do what to clear a blocker.

The shape

Render exactly three labeled sections, in this order, each as a single line:

Yesterday: <what shipped / landed / merged / went out>
Today:     <the one thing committed to finish today>
Blockers:  <owner + specific ask, or "None">

No preamble, no sign-off, no narrative sentences around the sections. If a section has more than one item, keep them on the one line separated by semicolons — do not spill into a paragraph.

The three rules that carry the update

1. Yesterday is outcomes, not activity. Report what finished and is verifiable —

what merged, shipped, went to prod, got approved, closed. Cut the process verbs that describe effort without a result: "worked on", "looked into", "spent time on", "made progress on", "continued", "investigated". If something was genuinely still in flight, it belongs under Today, not dressed up as a completed Yesterday.

• Activity (weak): "Worked on the login flow and debugged some auth issues."
• Outcome (strong): "Shipped the login rate-limiter; auth-timeout fix merged to main."

1. Today is one committed thing, stated as a commitment. Name the single item you are

on the hook to finish today, phrased as what will be done — not a wish list, not "hope to", not three maybes. If the day realistically holds one deliverable, promise one.

1. Every blocker names an owner and a specific ask. A blocker is only useful if the

room knows who can clear it and what to do. State both: the person or team who owns the unblock, and the exact action you need from them. Never leave a blocker as a vague feeling of being stuck.

• Vague (useless): "Still blocked on the payments integration."
• Actionable: "Blocked on staging creds — need Priya to grant Stripe test-mode access

by EOD."

• If there is genuinely nothing blocking, write Blockers: None. Do not invent one,

and do not drop the line.

Handling thin or messy notes

• If the notes never say what finished, do not manufacture a shipped item — write

Yesterday: nothing landed (or the honest partial) rather than promoting in-progress work to done.

• If a blocker is named but the owner is missing from the notes, keep the specific ask and

flag the owner as unknown ("need someone who owns CI to re-enable the runner") rather than silently dropping who is responsible.

• Strip everything that is neither an outcome, a commitment, nor a blocker — mood,

apologies, and background color do not belong in a standup line.