Most employees can’t stand busywork – spending the day on pointless tasks with little value. They find it discouraging and unengaging, meaning management should avoid it at all costs.
Leaders within agile software development and related frameworks can avoid assigning busywork by establishing sprint goals during the sprint planning phase. Agreed upon by Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and stakeholders, these simple, time-bound statements of work tie tasks to corporate strategy and vision.
Sprint goals help team members focus, prioritize, and align on their assigned duties. By helping staff see how their contributions impact the big picture, sprint goals provide context and purpose to their work.
Agile teams often overlook sprint goals during the planning process. Here’s what you need to know to integrate the process into your Scrum team’s practice.
What is a sprint goal?
An agile sprint goal is a brief statement outlining what the Scrum team plans to achieve during a two- to four-week sprint. Generally, the Product Owner drafts the goals in consultation with the Scrum Master and stakeholders during the planning meeting. Together, they identify the goal’s value and organizational benefit, helping the development team focus its efforts.
A productive goal defines an ambitious objective that’s connected to backlog tasks without being too broad. Sprint goals typically accomplish one of the following:
- Conduct a usability test for assumptions involved in a larger project
- Address risks by fixing an issue, changing the architecture, or addressing a technical debt
- Respond to user or client requests to prototype a new feature
To ensure sprint goals clarify an increment’s purpose, they should specify:
- What the team is working toward
- Why completing the sprint backlog is valuable
- The goal’s value and why stakeholders should care about its execution
These factors inform the team’s approach during the sprint. A clear goal defines backlog prioritization, helps measure progress, and supports decision-making throughout sprint and agile events, including daily Scrum meetings, retrospectives, and sprint reviews.
An example of a sprint goal might be to improve e-commerce customer satisfaction by 15% by implementing an online customer support portal.
Benefits of writing sprint goals
Some Scrum teams skip establishing sprint goals in favor of direct planning based on mapping their product backlog. Although backlog grooming may provide a to-do list of tasks, it doesn’t support prioritization or help them pivot if they uncover a new issue or task mid-sprint.
A sprint goal should be created at the beginning of sprint planning. The goal should serve as a reference point to help team members focus on their tasks or adapt and reprioritize when necessary.
In addition, sprint goals provide the following benefits:
- Guide sprint planning
- Promote coherent and focused decision-making that aligns with corporate strategy and vision
- Assist the Product Owner in establishing the product roadmap
- Introduce assessment benchmarks and metrics to monitor team progress, value, and success
- Boost sprint velocity by building functional flexibility into plans
- Provide a framework for daily Scrums
- Establish the reason for building a product increment
- Encourage product cohesion by facilitating feature and functional developments that work together
- Prioritize the sprint backlog
- Promote teamwork and accountability
How to define sprint goals
Look online, and you’ll uncover many tips and suggestions for defining sprint goals. You’ll even find templates created by industry luminaries like Roman Pichler and Ken Schwaber’s Scrum.org.
Whether you use a homegrown solution or a predefined template, the following recommendations will help you establish a sprint goal that clarifies the Scrum objective, aligns tasks, and focuses the team on the highest-value priorities.
Be SMART
The SMART method is crucial to establishing any goal, including sprint goals. Here are the SMART goal criteria:
- Specific: Clearly and precisely define what the Scrum team is trying to achieve, including success measures.
- Measurable: Determine the metrics and standards that will track progress and results, including the definition of completion. These factors establish objective benchmarks, ensuring a stakeholder’s opinion isn’t the sole determinant of team success.
- Achievable: Work with the Scrum Master and team to set ambitious yet realistic goals based on available time and resources. If the goal is too big for a single sprint, break it into smaller chunks.
- Relevant: Connect each sprint goal with broader business objectives to ensure they’re relevant to the organization’s mission. By demonstrating relevance, sprint goals establish value to customers or leaders, encouraging stakeholder buy-in.
- Time-bound: Sprints are time-boxed by their very nature. Communicating delivery deadlines helps team members plan and prioritize the sprint backlog while remaining accountable to established timelines.
Remember the “why”
A sprint goal defines the underlying purpose of the sprint while building alignment and direction within the backlog. However, if the goal is too broadly outlined or disconnected from customer or business value, it could hamper delivery.
Demonstrate why team members’ work matters and how it supports organizational strategy by ensuring they understand how the outcome impacts the company and its clients. An effective sprint goal clearly outlines why the sprint is essential and how tasks connect to deliver value.
With that connection in sight, a Scrum team’s work has meaning, building alignment and motivating the team to focus on the task at hand.
Stay flexible
Agile practices ensure development teams have the capacity to adapt to dynamic circumstances. Treat sprint goals as guideposts – not rigid requirements – to allow your team the freedom to respond to new information, evolving customer needs, or unexpected issues. Flexibility enables them to move forward while maintaining alignment with critical sprint objectives to deliver the required outcome.
5 characteristics of a highly effective sprint goal
Drafting a sprint goal is only one half of the equation. If you want it to be effective at guiding and motivating the Scrum team, the goal statement should have the following attributes:
1. Provide insight
An effective sprint goal clearly defines what the team expects to accomplish during a sprint and how it will drive value. When the Scrum team understands what they’re trying to accomplish and the expected outcomes, they can brainstorm ways to achieve the objective and overcome subsequent challenges.
2. Consider the end-user or business
A successful sprint goal outlines how it will deliver customer value or positively impact the organization. Test the sprint goal by asking these questions:
- What can users do differently after we achieve this sprint goal?
- Which business area will this sprint goal help, and how?
If the goal doesn’t answer these questions, it’s too ambiguous. Revisit the statement to make it more specific and meaningful, seeking stakeholder clarification if necessary. Clarification reduces the risk of misunderstandings and ensures effective collaboration.
3. Specify the outcome
Describe the goal’s deliverables so the team recognizes success. During the process, distinguish outcome from output. An output reflects the team’s actions, whereas the outcome is a measurable result.
- Output: A/B test a new service subscription form to see which version delivers the highest conversion rate.
- Outcome: Generate 500 new subscriptions using a sign-up form that was optimized via A/B testing.
4. Be fearless
As the Scrum team’s experience grows, so should sprint goal ambitions. The higher the team aims, the faster they will progress and learn.
And if they don’t meet their goals, failure offers its own insights and data. When your team considers what they want to learn ahead of time and roots the objective within the sprint goal, failure provides a learning opportunity. They simply need to analyze and reflect on failures during sprint reviews and retrospectives.
5. Center the team
Agile replaces the old command-and-control project management methodology with autonomous working groups that decide how to approach a problem. To demonstrate trust, the product manager must allow the team to contribute and consent to the sprint goal’s final wording. Team members can take ownership of the work when stakeholders consider their input.
The perfect Tempo: How sprint goals drive agile success
Establishing sprint goals is only part of the job. The next step is to ensure Scrum teams have the staff, tools, and resources to get the job done. That’s where Tempo comes in.
Capacity Planner is a Jira-enabled tool that supports project management by optimizing capacity planning and resource allocation throughout the sprint. The app’s two-way sync with Jira allows Scrum teams to increase productivity by visualizing teams, plans, and shared resources.
Combine Capacity Planner with Tempo’s Strategic Roadmaps to let product managers create a story map of all product backlog items, building visibility into sprint planning and milestones. With a prioritized backlog, team members will know which tasks to address during the upcoming months, quarters, or years.
