Standup Prep Workflow

Skill: /standup-prep Pairs with: /client-standup-summary Frequency: Daily Time investment: 2–5 minutes input + 30 seconds to verify output

Why this exists

Standup is one of the highest-leverage two minutes of a PM's day. It's also the easiest to walk into underprepared — a quick scan of the board thirty seconds before the call is not the same as having a clear read.

The skill does the synthesis. You verify it and add what only you know.

What it catches that a board scan misses: drift signals (a story with no update for two days that "seems fine"), questions you should be asking but haven't surfaced, and things that arrived in Slack or from stakeholders that the team doesn't know yet.

What you bring

Three types of input. Paste whatever you have — raw is fine.

1. Iteration plan The stories in flight and their current status. A Linear board export, a copy-paste from Jira, or a quick written summary all work. This is the minimum required input.

2. Yesterday's updates What the team reported yesterday, your own notes, prior standup notes. Helps the agent identify what moved and what didn't.

3. New signals Slack threads from overnight or this morning, PR comments, stakeholder messages — anything that arrived since yesterday's standup. This is what feeds the "Things You Might Not Have Seen" section.

If you only have the iteration plan, the agent works with that and flags what it cannot assess without the rest.

What you get

Story Status Table Every story in flight with a status label and a one-sentence justification. The justification is the point — "At Risk" with no reason is useless. "At Risk — PR has been open since Tuesday with no reviewer assigned" tells you what to do in standup.

Blockers to Raise Only real blockers, formatted so you can say them clearly: [Story] is blocked on [what] — needs [who] to [action]. If there are none, the section says so.

Questions to Ask Specific questions to surface with the team. Not "how's it going?" — "The auth flow story has had no update signal in 48 hours — is it waiting on something?" These are written for you to ask, not to read aloud.

Pace Check One sentence on whether the iteration is tracking toward its goal. If the data doesn't support a confident answer, the skill says so rather than guessing.

Things You Might Not Have Seen Signals from Slack or stakeholder messages the team may not know about yet. Omitted if nothing new was in the input.

Check before you go in Anything the agent flagged as uncertain, any status it couldn't confirm, any blocker it thinks might already be resolved. Your 30-second review targets this section first.

The review step is the one that matters

The agent synthesizes from what you paste. You validate against what you know.

Before standup, spend 30 seconds:

Does the status read feel right? Anything obviously wrong?
Are the flagged blockers real, or did something resolve since you pasted the input?
Is there context the agent couldn't know — a hallway conversation, team energy, something a dev mentioned offhand — that changes the picture?

You don't need to update the document. Carry the corrections in your head. The sheet is a reference, not a deliverable.

Anti-patterns

Don't treat agent assessment as truth. The agent works from what you paste. If the input is stale or incomplete, the output reflects that. You are the verification step. The skill makes this explicit — anything uncertain is flagged rather than asserted.

Don't read output verbatim in standup. This is a personal reference sheet. Your standup voice should sound like you. The sheet is for your eyes, not the team's ears.

Don't skip the workflow when things seem fine. That's exactly when it catches things. A story with no update signal for two days that "seems fine" is invisible, not fine. The skill catches invisible.

Don't use it to write talking points for stakeholders. This output is for you. It's not formatted for sharing. Run /client-standup-summary for anything that goes to client stakeholders.

Pairing with /client-standup-summary

After standup is done:

Take your standup notes — raw is fine. What was said, what came up, what the team reported.
Run /client-standup-summary with those notes + iteration context + audience.
Review the output (30 seconds — same drill as above).
Send to async client stakeholders.

Same-day sequence, under 5 minutes from standup notes to sent update:

/standup-prep → standup → /client-standup-summary → async update sent

Gets faster with practice

First time: 5 minutes of pasting and reviewing. You're figuring out what to include.

After a week: 2 minutes. You know exactly what to paste — the Linear export, last night's Slack thread, yesterday's notes — and where to look in the output.

After a month: You start noticing what the skill catches that you'd have missed, and you start feeding it better signals automatically.

Worked example

Input pasted:

Iteration 12, days remaining: 3, goal: user auth complete and in staging

Stories in flight:

Login flow: PR open, no reviewer

Password reset: in progress, no update since Monday

Session management: done, accepted yesterday

Slack from this morning: Designer messaged that the login screen copy changed — "Sign in" changed to "Log in" — needs to be updated in the PR

Output (abbreviated):

Story	Status	Why
Login flow	At Risk	PR open with no reviewer assigned — 2 days until iteration ends
Password reset	Unknown	No update signal since Monday — 3 days
Session management	Done	Accepted yesterday

Blockers to Raise: Login flow PR needs a reviewer assigned today — otherwise won't make iteration.

Questions to Ask: Password reset has had no update signal since Monday — what's the status? Is it waiting on something?

Pace Check: At risk of missing the iteration goal if login flow PR isn't reviewed today and password reset isn't further along than the board shows.

Things You Might Not Have Seen: Designer updated login screen copy — "Sign in" → "Log in" — needs to be reflected in the login flow PR before it merges.

Check before you go in: Password reset status is Unknown — verify before standup whether this is a signal gap or actual drift.