Examples Of Real Sprint Goals: And the reasoning and considerations that shaped them

Examples Of Real Sprint Goals: And the reasoning and considerations that shaped them

Examples Of Real Sprint Goals: And the reasoning and considerations that shaped them
via Scrum.org Blog by Christiaan Verwijs

Although most people see the value of Sprint Goals, how to create them is a huge source of confusion and frustration. Is the Spring Goal there before the Sprint Backlog? How do you create a Sprint Goal out of the unrelated set of items at the top of your Product Backlog? And should everything on the Sprint Backlog be related to the Sprint Goal?

There are some great posts out there that present a conceptual model for thinking about Sprint Goals, like this one and this one. But no matter the model, people frequently struggle to translate it to their own work.

So instead, I decided to write the story of a real product and (some of) the Sprint Goals we used there. By working from real examples, I hope I can help people build a better understanding of the kind of reasoning that informs Sprint Goals. And how it shapes both the Sprint Backlog, refinement, and the other way around.

A bit of background

This post concerns the development of a product that aimed to make a set of related HR-products — both our own and from partners — accessible through a single platform. This ranged from software for hour registration to invoicing and from recruitment to personnel planning. The new product was intended to reduce the pain of having dozens of individual products, all with their own logins, dashboards, and purchasing procedures. A dedicated Scrum Team worked on the product for over a year, and although the composition changed, the product is still maintained by them. Sprints had a length of two weeks (later one). The team was cross-functional in the sense of having the skills for requirement analysis, visual design, testing, development, and quality assurance.

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