What is a Sprint Goal?
- A sprint goal is the overarching objective to be accomplished during a sprint. It motivates running the sprint and allows flexibility in negotiating the work to achieve that objective. In contrast to a vision, sprint goals are more tangible. This is because it is time-bound to the duration of the sprint. It answers the questions:
- Why are we going to work hard as a team to complete all sprint backlog items?
- Why should stakeholders care and support the team?
Benefits of Crafting a Sprint Goal:
Like any goal, the sprint goal will help you as a team:
- Stay focused.
- Define what is valuable.
- Determine priority.
- See progress.
How to Craft a Good Sprint Goal:
- Like any operational goal, a sprint goal should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. As sprints are time-boxed iterations, every sprint goal is naturally time-bound: It must be reached by the end of the sprint. The actual expected results and outcomes are defined by the sprint backlog.
- To pick the right goal, choose the risk that is likely to hurt you most if it is not addressed immediately.
Examples of Specific Measurable Sprint Goals Versus Unclear Sprint Goals:
| Unclear Sprint Goal | Clearer Sprint Goal |
|---|---|
| Improve performance. | Decrease page load time by X% to improve performance |
| Create a prototype | Create a paper prototype of the user registration feature to test our user interaction ideas |
| Improve Enterprise-class quality | Secure enterprise-class quality for web clients after recent customer complaints. |
| Refactor our old login interface | Refactor our old login interface to achieve 25% better conversion rate on the login page. |
| Improve customer retention rate | Improve retention rate by X% by providing a better feedback mechanism. |
What if the Objectives are unrelated, How Does a Team Craft the Sprint Goal?
Imagine a scenario where a Product Manager provides unrelated objectives: enhancing the UI in one product, fixing bugs in another, and improving performance in a third. While all these objectives add value to the business and are prioritized in the backlog, crafting a cohesive Sprint Goal presents a challenge.
In such cases, the convergence of disparate objectives into a single Sprint Goal can be challenging but not impossible. The Scrum Team must come together to craft a Sprint Goal, understand it, and continually adapt their plan to achieve it.
However, focusing on multiple unrelated items comes at a cost. It can lead to decreased productivity within the Development Team, as individuals may struggle to align with a cohesive goal. Moreover, the team may fragment, with each part focusing on a different aspect of the Sprint Goal, hindering collaboration and completion of the overall Sprint Goal.
Here are a few strategies to address this issue:
- Find a common goal that binds all the unrelated objectives together, if possible.
- Prioritize the most important objective and make it the Sprint Goal. This approach encourages discussions about why the remaining Sprint work isn’t aligned with the chosen goal, fostering alignment and focus.
- Craft the Sprint Goal with multiple points, reflecting the unrelated objectives, but be prepared to observe potential inefficiencies. Use retrospectives to reflect on the team’s performance and adapt accordingly.
