Scrum Without Sprint Goals: When Frameworks Don’T Fit
Rethinking Sprint Goals in Agile Frameworks
Sprint goals are a core component of agile frameworks like Scrum, aiming to provide focus and alignment for development teams working in short, timeboxed iterations. Well-defined sprint goals keep teams concentrated on delivering the most valuable user stories and product increments in line with the overall product strategy and vision. However, in some cases, rigid sprint goals can constrain teams rather than empower them to be truly agile. When product visions are unclear, plans frequently change, or unexpected obstacles arise, strict sprint goal setting can create friction rather than foster alignment. In these situations, teams need alternatives for maintaining focus and strategic alignment without prescribing specific sprint objectives, learning to adapt workflows to meet changing realities rather than trying to fit reality into a predefined process framework.
Why Sprint Goals Matter
To understand when and why sprint goals fail, it is important to first recognize why they are normally beneficial for agile teams:
Keep team focused on business value
Well-defined sprint goals orient the Scrum Team toward delivering user stories and product increments that offer the most customer and business value in that time period. Rather than just completing disparate development tasks, the team rallies around a shared short-term objective.
Align work to overall product strategy
Sprint goals also enable the Product Owner to connect ongoing development efforts with the overarching product vision and strategy. This ensures the Scrum Team works in service of broader product outcomes rather than just “getting things done.”
Provide clarity on sprint priorities
Finally, clearly articulated sprint goals offer guidance for the Scrum Team on what to prioritize in that sprint – what user stories or features take precedence given the current objective. This informs decisions should the team need to descope planned work based on capacity.
When Sprint Goals Don’t Fit
While sprint goals offer many benefits for focus and alignment, they also bring challenges in certain situations:
Strict timeboxes constrain goal-setting
The pressure to define and meet goals within short, fixed-length sprints can undermine meaningful planning. Unexpected issues force teams to either descope goals late in sprints or carry over work across multiple iterations to meet original targets, neither of which is ideal.
Unclear product vision or strategy
When product leadership has not sufficiently defined the long-term product vision and strategy, sprint goals may serve little purpose. Without clarity on where the product is heading, teams have no compass to orient sprint objectives toward broader strategic outcomes.
Unexpected impediments derail plans
No matter how carefully defined, sprint goals are often disrupted by unforeseen dependencies, technical challenges or external impediments. Rigid goal-setting diminishes agility to adapt to changing realities.
Alternatives for Focus and Alignment
Rather than clinging tightly to predefined sprint goals, teams can maintain focus and strategic alignment in other ways:
Emphasize user stories and acceptance criteria
Well-refined user stories and detailed acceptance criteria ensure development efforts deliver clear customer value, even absent directional sprint goals. Goal-setting shifts from the sprint level to the level of individual product increments.
Set “north star” objectives for product
While sprint goals may prove too rigid, product leadership can provide “north star” vision statements, themes or objectives to orient teams. These touchpoints are revisited frequently but only change when fundamental shifts occur in product direction.
Adapt workflows instead of frameworks
Rather than strictly following predefined processes, teams focus on adapting their workflows to meet evolving realities while still applying agile principles like fast feedback cycles. Outcomes take precedence over prescribed methods.
Achieving Agility Without Rigid Sprint Goals
By taking the alternatives above along with a few additional steps, teams can achieve true business agility even when rigid sprint goal-setting does not make sense:
Focus more on fast feedback and pivoting
In dynamic or uncertain environments, obsessively gathering user feedback, measuring outcomes, and pivoting approaches is more important than upfront goal alignment. Teams learn and adjust together each iteration.
Build in flexibility for unknowns
Leaving room for the unexpected enables teams to incorporate emerging dependencies or impediments into each sprint’s outcomes rather than derailing existing plans.
Keep aligning on product purpose and key results
While sprint goals may be counterproductive, repeatedly revisiting the core product purpose and key outcomes needed to deliver that purpose keeps teams anchored to strategic priorities amidst turbulence.
Key Takeaways
By reconsidering strict sprint goal prescriptions and shifting some agile principles to the product increment level or adjusting workflows based on broader objectives, teams can achieve focus and alignment even when predefined sprint goals do not fit their realities:
Examples of sprint goal challenges
– Difficulty predicting capacity and de-scoping late in sprints
– Lack of clear long-term product vision from leadership
– Frequent interruptions from production issues
Strategies to drive alignment without goals
– Define user stories tightly with acceptance criteria
– Set broad “north star” vision for the product direction
– Adapt processes instead of strictly adhering to structure
Principles for staying agile amidst uncertainty
– Obsessively gather user feedback each iteration
– Incorporate flexibility into plans for unknowns
– Frequently re-anchor on core product purpose
