Do You Need a Sprint Goal?

A sprint goal is an objective that the team plans to meet for the sprint. The sprint goal is proposed by the product owner but agreed upon by the entire team after discussion and negotiation. The goal is not simply a list of the product backlog items but rather a high-level description of the purpose of the work to be completed.

For example, your sprint goal can be to:

• Improve the reliability of the data retrieval system.
• Make the online customer support chat available to customers.
• Create a proof of concept to determine the feasibility of using a new database to store system performance data.

Along with the goal, you should establish the criteria to determine whether the goal has been met. For example, if your sprint goal is to “improve the reliability of the data retrieval system”, you could consider the goal met if you improve the availability of the system by completing the build of a redundant data store.

Although some teams do not use sprint goals, they are a valuable tool that provides focus to sprint planning and to the work during the sprint. Sprint goals answer the question of why the work needs to be done not just what needs to be done. They help team members to see how their work relates to the work of the other members of the team and how the team’s work relates to the goals of the product or service that they are developing.

If you have been working with Scrum for some time and have not used sprint goals, you might want to start and see how they impact your team’s work.