The Check-inDaily Check-inA 15-minute daily ritual where the team surfaces reality and unknowns rather than reporting status. is the daily living document the Daily Check-in writes to. It’s a shared, running record of what the team knows and what it’s stuck on — and it is the raw oil of every other artifact. Retrospectives, demos, and Product BoardProduct BoardTwo or more stakeholders who see the team's weekly demo and coach it — the human in the loop, with no single lead. meetings all draw from it. Keep it clean and properly archived.

The running order

The Daily Check-in moves through the document in a fixed order so it stays short:

1. Ask if everyone prepared. If not, give everybody five minutes to do so now — a prepared Check-in is a short Check-in.
2. Questions / FYI — answer open questions, mention new FYIs.
3. Lessons Learned — discuss together; plan actions where an insight warrants it.
4. Things to Figure OutThings to Figure OutEach person's one thing to figure out today, framed as a Why/How/What/When question that resolves into a Lesson Learned. — each person writes the one thing most important to figure out today.
5. Final check — (a) are we still on track to deliver this week, and if not, how do we get back on track? (b) Don’t sign out before everyone has at least one TFO.

The sections

Two sections are mandatory; two are optional.

Questions / FYI

Holidays, disruptions, good or bad news; questions that can wait but everyone should be aware of; questions that need several people’s input; things worth raising in the reserved Collab Time afterwards.

Lessons Learned

What reality taught us since yesterday — anything you’d normally save for a retro, useful links, docs and blog posts, surprises good or bad from your TFOs, and the result of any TFO that reduced an UncertaintyUncertaintyWhat the team does not yet know — sized and tracked deliberately rather than hidden inside estimates.. Tag a lesson #10percent when it’s a 10%-better opportunity. The rule that closes the loop: every completed TFO produces a Lesson Learned. Seven #10percent lessons, acted on, roughly double a team’s productivity.

Things to Figure Out (TFO)

Exactly one thing each person commits to figure out today, scoped to a single day. The prompt — “what are you going to figure out today?” — is a better question than “what will you do today?” because it splits big, multi-day tasks into one-day learnings. Phrase it as a Why / How / What / When question, not a task: “Why do our estimates keep missing the mark?” not “review estimates.” When the genuine thing really is a todo (“Release Y”), that’s fine. Completing a TFO produces a Lesson Learned, which is why TFOs are Uncertainties in motion.

Optional: Unknowns & Uncertainties

What we don’t know yet. The daily prompt is “what’s your biggest uncertainty right now?” Items that survive the Check-in feed the Uncertainty ListUncertainty ListThe team's living list of open unknowns — sized 1/3/5, phrased as questions, reviewed daily and in planning, chipped away each week..

Optional: Waiting for Answer

Items blocked on another team. The focus here is on what reduces wait time, not on logging the wait.

Why write it down

Spoken status evaporates. A written Check-in lets anyone reconstruct the week, feeds every downstream artifact, and keeps the Daily Check-in short — prepared async, gone through in order, talking only about what needs talking about.