Rethinking Sprint Goals in Scrum Teams
Addressing the challenge low-value sprint goals
In numerous Scrum teams, a prevalent yet misguided practice often occurs. After refining Product Backlog Items (PBIs), these items are pulled into a sprint, followed by an attempt to formulate a sprint goal. This sequence, although common, typically results in the creation of superficial and ineffective sprint goals. Instead of acting as a strong driving force, these goals merely categorize the selected PBIs. They lack strategic depth, purpose, and focus. Consequently, teams find themselves simply completing one PBI after another without a clear, unified objective, straying from the core principles of the Scrum framework.
Retrofitting a sprint goal may have many negatives:
Lack of Strategic Alignment: Sprint goals created as an afterthought often fail to align with the product's broader vision, leading to efforts that don't support long-term objectives.
Unclear Outcomes and Success Measures: Without a well-defined sprint goal, determining what success looks like becomes difficult, and the team lacks a clear direction for their efforts.
Task-Oriented Focus Over Business Value: This approach emphasizes completing tasks rather than achieving meaningful business outcomes, which can undermine the product’s overall value.
Compromised Stakeholder Communication: Communication becomes more about task completion rather than progress towards strategic product outcomes, leading to potential misalignment with stakeholders.
Reduced Flexibility and Creativity: Rigid task lists can limit the team's ability to adapt to changes and stifle creative solutions that might better serve the product.
Lowered Team Morale and Engagement: Teams may feel less motivated and engaged when working without meaningful, well-defined goals, affecting their performance and satisfaction.
Zombie Behavior: Teams might mechanically follow Scrum processes without engaging with their true purpose, reducing the effectiveness and benefits of the framework.
The sprint goal is trivialised and has no value resulting in it not being taken seriously. Yet people know goals are important, but they still try. Putting solutions before goals is akin to putting the cart before the horse; it is the wrong way around!
The other callout is if your team has been getting low value from goals for a long time, have you really taken the spirit of Scrum seriously? Have you made it transparent, inspected it, tried to learn, and figured out how to really use sprint goals effectively? Or have you just been following the framework mechanically like zombies? Remember, Scrum is there to reveal what is ineffective and provide a framework to help you improve.
How do you fix this problem?
Here is my guidance to you, but you need to apply this to your situation.
The Product Owner should really be focusing on the product goal. For very large products, one may create big milestone goals that either align with releases or major areas for focus delivery. There is much more to this than this paragraph and a post for a later date.
However, once there is a product goal, the Scrum Team and stakeholders should create a roadmap of many small goals, that is, many small stepping stones and milestones. Over time, learn to start trying to get these smaller step goals to be aligned with sprint goals. They should not define solutions, but outcomes the business is after. The ideal time and place to be talking about this is Sprint Reviews with all stakeholders present.
Examples of sprint goals (over-simplified):
Customers are able to browse products online.
Customers can add products to their shopping cart.
Customers checkout and details for delivery.
Take payment for products in the shopping cart
Notice there is no solution, technology, or even product feature. It is these small goals that start formulating your sprint goals. Over time your team and stakeholders will start thinking more in line with sprint goals and become very effective at it, but it is going to take a lot of retrospection and attempts to master it.
Sprint Reviews and refinement should ensure this roadmap of goals and outcomes is well understood by teams and stakeholders. Remember, it’s not a rigid roadmap and it may change over time as you learn and uncover things. After all building products is complex and requires adaptive solutions based on discovery.
Turning goals into solutions
An extremely mature Scrum team that embraces all that is agility will just validate that the goal is something in their area of expertise and they are able to run with it; that is their refinement. They will defer solutions for the sprint planning. In sprint planning, they will come up with technical solutions and features to build to meet that goal.
Your team may just be starting out and there are challenges in your environment, so your team may start doing some of this in refinement. I would just guide you not to refine in detail more than two or three sprints out. Then start retrospecting to defer things for Just-In-Time. Remember, you want to treat the iterative process as a learning and feedback mechanism versus a must-get-it-right-first attempt. That is, have a crack, build an idea, show it, and get feedback, if not right adjust and try again. You may want to read my post on this A Wake-Up Call for Product Development - The Power of Iterative Progress.
Creating goals early, and communicating the roadmap of these goals with stakeholders gives purpose and direction. But it also gives a sense of better accomplishment when the goals are met and a solution is delivered. It starts changing the behavior from giving the teams tasks to deliver to one or more asking them to come up with a solution to a business need. It aims to break the “work order” and “Feature factory” mentality. The impact of getting sprint goals done has a massive impact on how the team is perceived and treated. If done right, it is empowering for teams giving them more self-management. Without this drive, the teams normally revert to work-order teams.
Your roadmap of goals should never be cast in stone and should leverage learning, feedback, and current market pressures. Also, the team may realize a goal is too big or small for a sprint and may tweak or adjust it to fit timeboxing, reduce risk, and enhance feedback. Remember the Product Owner is part of the Scrum Team too.
Take the Leap to Transform Your Scrum!
Are you tired of the mundane, checkbox-ticking approach to Scrum in your team? Do you feel the sprint goals you set lack the strategic depth and impact they truly deserve? It’s time for a change!
🚀 Rethink Your Sprint Goals: Shift from a task-oriented mindset to a goal-driven approach. Let’s not just do Scrum; let’s live it! Embrace the spirit of Scrum by setting meaningful, strategically aligned sprint goals.
🔍 Reveal, Inspect, and Adapt: If your sprint goals aren’t adding value or aligning with your product vision, it's time for introspection. Utilize the power of Scrum to uncover inefficiencies and brainstorm ways to enhance the efficacy of your goals.
🌟 Create a Roadmap of many small goals: Work with your Product Owner and stakeholders to break down your product goal into achievable, impactful milestones. Let these guide your sprints and infuse them with a sense of purpose and direction.
👥 Foster Team Collaboration: Engage your entire team in the goal-setting process. Remember, the Product Owner is a key player too. Collaborative goal setting not only enhances alignment but also boosts team morale and creativity.
🔄 Keep Adapting: Your roadmap isn’t set in stone. Be agile in your approach, ready to tweak and adapt as you learn and receive feedback. Strive for goals that balance timeboxing, risk reduction, and valuable feedback.
📈 Make Transparency a Priority: Regularly review the impact of your sprint goals. Are they driving the right outcomes? How can they be improved? Openly discuss these points in your retrospectives and plan actions for continuous improvement.
🔗 Learn More: Subscribe or join my community at https://cohort.womplers.com (a different platform) and we can chat more.
💡 Your Scrum Journey Awaits: Embrace these changes, and watch your team's approach to Scrum evolve from mere task execution to creating meaningful, business-driven outcomes. Let's make your Scrum process not just functional, but exceptional. Start now and see the transformation unfold!
Did this give you some food for thought, please share in the comments.