Automated Daily Standup Summaries with Spinach.ai

Go to spinach.ai and click Get started free. Sign up with your Google Workspace or Slack account — using Slack is strongly recommended since it's the primary delivery channel for async standups.

Complete the short onboarding: enter your team name, select your team size, and indicate whether you want live meeting facilitation, async standups, or both.

What you should see: Your Spinach dashboard with a prompt to create your first "Board" (Spinach's term for a team/project workspace).

Troubleshooting: If you sign up with email instead of Slack, you'll need to connect Slack manually in Settings → Integrations before async standups will work.

Click + New Board and name it after your project (e.g., "ERP Implementation — Delivery Team" or "Q2 Website Redesign").

Configure the board settings:

• Team members: Add each person by email or Slack username
• Standup type: Choose Async for teams that don't hold a live standup, or Live if you run a Zoom/Teams standup you want Spinach to join and facilitate
• Meeting days: Select which days you run standups (typically Monday–Friday)
• Standup time: Set when the daily prompt goes out to team members (e.g., 8:30am)
• Reminder time: Set a nudge for anyone who hasn't submitted by a certain time (e.g., 9:15am)
• Slack channel: Select the project channel where compiled summaries will post (e.g., #erp-team-standup)

What you should see: A configured board showing your team members and standup schedule.

Troubleshooting: If team members don't appear in the Slack user search, they may need to join the Slack workspace first or be added to the project channel.

Spinach's default standup format is the classic Scrum structure: Yesterday / Today / Blockers. This is a fine starting point, but you can customize it for your project type.

Go to your board → Settings → Questions and consider adding:

• "Any risks or issues I want the PM to know about?" (surfaces things people don't always say out loud)
• "Confidence level for your sprint goal today?" (1–5 scale, useful for early warning)
• "Any client feedback or requests received?" (valuable for consulting engagements)

Keep it to 3–5 questions maximum. More than 5 and team members start skipping.

What you should see: Your custom question set displayed in the board's configuration panel.

If your team uses Jira, go to Settings → Integrations → Jira and connect your Jira Cloud workspace (OAuth flow, takes 2 minutes).

With Jira connected:

• Team members can link blockers directly to Jira tickets in their standup update
• Spinach auto-surfaces any tickets assigned to a team member that moved to "In Progress" or "Blocked" status since yesterday
• The compiled summary includes a Jira ticket status section alongside the team's written updates

What you should see: A green checkmark next to the Jira integration and a "Jira Activity" section appearing in the board's summary view.

Troubleshooting: If Jira connection fails, confirm you're connecting to a Jira Cloud instance (not Jira Server/Data Center — those require a different integration approach).

Before rolling this out to your team, test it yourself. In the board view, click Run standup → Test mode. Spinach sends you the standup prompt in Slack.

Fill in a sample update as if you were a team member. After submitting, go back to the board and check the compiled summary.

What you should see: Your test update appearing in the summary, formatted with your name, date, and the answers to each question.

Send your team a quick message explaining the change. A simple message that works:

Teams generally adapt in 2–3 days. The biggest resistance is usually habit-switching, not the tool itself.

What you should see: Team members submitting their first standup updates on Day 1.

Each morning, after the submission window closes (typically 9:30–10am), Spinach posts a compiled summary to your Slack channel. Open it and scan for:

• Blockers: Anyone who reported a blocker needs your attention first
• Confidence drops: If someone's confidence score dropped from yesterday, reach out
• Gaps: Team members who didn't submit (Spinach flags these as "No update")
• Themes: Multiple people mentioning the same thing (e.g., "waiting on client approval") signals a risk you should be tracking

The whole review takes 2–3 minutes. You no longer need to run a live standup just to collect status information.

What you should see: A Slack post in your project channel with each team member's update formatted under their name, and a blockers section highlighted at the top.

If your team runs a live standup via Zoom or Teams, Spinach can join as a facilitator. In the board settings, select Live standup mode and connect your calendar.

Spinach joins the call and:

• Displays a timer to keep each person's update to their allocated time (e.g., 2 minutes each)
• Captures what each person says
• Posts the compiled summary to Slack automatically after the call

This is particularly useful if you have a distributed team where standup tends to run over time.

What you should see: Spinach joining as a participant, with a timer display visible to all attendees.