Maarten's Sprint Goal Template

A few weeks back, I reviewed 4 Sprint Goal templates, with the goal of using what I’ve learned to create a better template than what’s already out there.

I want to stress that my template will be both better and worse. That may sound confusing. Let me try to explain by talking about fish.

Tuna fish are among the fastest in the sea, but if they stop swimming, they will suffocate because of lack of oxygen. Tuna fish even continue swimming while sleeping, which costs a lot of energy.

Their gills need the counterflow of water to extract enough oxygen from the ocean. If they are not moving, less water passes through their gills, and they won’t get sufficient oxygen to survive. Hence, farmed tuna fish are kept in an area where they can swim in circles to stay alive.

Swimming fast is awesome, but it comes at a cost. For Sprint Goal templates, like the zippy tuna fish, there isn’t one best way to do things in every situation. But enough about tuna. Let’s go back to the lovely realm of Sprint Goal templates.

Without further ado, I present: Maarten’s Sprint Goal template.

Why Did I Create Another Template?

I created this template because I identified the following areas where the existing Sprint Goal templates are lacking:

1. None of the templates answer: why do we even need a Sprint Goal?

2. None of the templates started with the question: should we even be working with Sprint Goals?

3. Most of the templates weren’t focused on collaboration or how we can craft a Sprint Goal together as a team.

4. Most of the templates focused on the goal, not the relevant context which is necessary to understand the goal. You need both.

5. None of the templates addressed common Sprint Goal anti-patterns you should know.

With these five identified weaknesses in mind, let me walk you through the template and how I’ve addressed each improvement area.

Why Do We Need Sprint Goals?

As you may know, I’ve written a whole book on Sprint Goals. There’s a lot you can write about why Sprint Goals matter. However, for the template, I decided to keep it short and sweet and focus on the essence:

Reality is too complicated and unpredictable to fit into a plan. Therefore, we need something that helps us change our plans to deal with it - the Commander’s Intent of a mission: What are we trying to achieve, and why does it matter?

The Sprint Goal is the Commander’s Intent (CI) of the Sprint: what are we trying to achieve, and why does it matter? It gives the team the freedom to change plans as necessary when surprises are discovered, or circumstances change. The Sprint Goal prevents following the plan from becoming more important than meeting the objective.

Okay, awesome! Now that you understand why Sprint Goals are crucial, how do you know if your team is ready to begin working with Sprint Goals?

How Do You Know If Your Team is Ready to Begin Working with Sprint Goals?

The bar for working with Sprint Goals is pretty high, and many teams don’t have the right conditions to begin working with Sprint Goals. On a high level, there are three questions you should be asking before considering working with Sprint Goals:

1. Does your team share a clear common goal they’re working towards?

2. Is your team often working together towards a single goal during the Sprint?

3. Is your team mostly given features to deliver while it’s unclear what problem we’re trying to solve?

You might be thinking, why these three questions? Let’s explore why these three questions are important.

The first question focuses on the presence of a long-term goal for your team. If your team doesn’t have a common objective they’re working towards, then you don’t really have a team. A team is a group of people working towards a common goal.

If your team doesn’t share a common goal, when you try to work with Sprint Goals, they likely won’t work because your team will struggle to formulate a common objective every SPrint. Your team isn’t working together towards a single goal outside of the Sprint, so they will likely also not be working together towards a single goal during the Sprint.

The absence of a long-term, shared goal in your Scrum Team is a symptom of something else. When you know that something else, you should think about whether you want to fix that, but you shouldn’t begin with Sprint Goals because all you’ll be doing is bumping your head against the wall.

The next question focuses on the ability to set short-term goals: Does your team often work together towards a single goal during the Sprint? You might have a clear long-term goal, but all your team members work on separate, unrelated things in every Sprint.

If your team is constantly working on different and unrelated things, they’re not working as a team. You likely have sub-teams within your team. A Sprint Goal only serves to make visible that you’re not working as a team and breeds frustration. If you want to work with Sprint Goals, you should first alleviate the problem of the team not working together during the Sprint.

The final question focuses on whether your team has sufficient understanding of what we’re trying to achieve: Is your team given features to deliver, or do they understand what problem we’re trying to solve? This matters because the goal is never to deliver a feature. The goal is to deliver what that feature is supposed to make possible.

That may seem like a trivial distinction, but the key thing to remember is this: we want to deliver as few features as possible that grant as much progress as possible. It’s not about how the features work but the work they can do for the users and what makes it possible for them. That’s why it’s crucial to understand the problem we’re trying to solve beyond delivering a specific feature.

I want to stress that Sprint Goals might also help deliver a feature because you still have the common objective of delivering a feature, but you won’t reap the full benefits of Sprint Goals. The ultimate superpower of Sprint Goals is that they make meeting the objective more important than following the plan, and the objective is never to deliver a feature but what that feature is supposed to make possible.

Okay, let’s say your team is ready to work with Sprint Goals after doing the Sprint Goal Readiness Check, then let’s get the band together to formulate a Sprint Goal!

Focus on Collaboration over Filling in a Template

Many templates out there focus on the template format and do not provide a way for the team to collaborate on setting a Sprint Goal. Having a good template format is great, but it’s even better to provide a blueprint for the team on how to formulate a Sprint Goal.

You divide the group into two groups and let one group answer question 1 and the other answer question 2. Then you get the whole group together to answer the following questions:

Okay, great. By answering these questions, we now have the first version of our Sprint Goal. How do we check whether we formulated a strong Sprint Goal and whether all the relevant context is supplied?

FOCUS: Checking Whether Your Sprint Goal is Solid and Strong

I came up with the FOCUS Acronym, which functions like INVEST for User Stories. You can use FOCUS to check your Sprint Goals:

1. Fun: Does our Sprint Goal have a fun title, or at the very least a memorable one?

2. Outcome-oriented: Can we come up with different ways of achieving the same result?

3. Collaborative: Did we set the Sprint Goal together with the whole team?

4. Ultimate: Is the relevant context provided that makes clear why the objective matters?

5. Singular: Is it a single objective, and not a list of (unrelated) objectives?

Here’s what it looks like in Miro, if you fill in the template together with your team:

Together you can check whether your Sprint Goal follows FOCUS, or you should make changes to make it even better.

Congratulations, now you’ve got your first Sprint Goal! I’ve also formulated some common anti-patterns that you’ve got to watch out for when working with Sprint Goals, and especially during Sprint Planning:

Use My Template to Hit the Ground Running with Sprint Goals!

Now that we’ve covered the template, please give it a spin and let me know your thoughts!