Why Team Planning Feels Harder Than It Should (and What To Do About It)
TL;DR
Sprint planning feels harder because distributed/async work, tool consolidation, and Atlassian AI expose priority noise, software estimation problems, and hidden dependencies. This guide shares three team planning best practices - set a clear order of work, estimate together to surface risk, and close the loop with action-driven retrospectives, so team alignment and team collaboration improve and plans hold up.
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Sprint planning should not feel like a shouting match where the loudest voice wins. Yet for many teams it has become a long meeting that drains energy, creates a weak plan, and falls apart by Wednesday.
The problem is not that your team forgot how to plan. The world around the plan changed. People work across time zones. More decisions happen in comments and tickets than in rooms. And the plan lives in tools that other people (and AI‑powered search) will read later. When the audience shifts from "who was in the meeting" to "everyone who touches the work", the plan must be clearer and better organised.
On one hand, AI and asynchronous collaboration are on the rise. On the other, we have a direct link between strong delivery capabilities and better performance. And those two lines meet in planning - if inputs are unclear, you simply do the wrong things faster.
We believe planning feels harder because three foundational elements have broken down:
- How priorities turn into an order of work,
- How estimates show risk (not just numbers), and
- How suggestions for improvements turn into real work.
When these are weak, planning becomes an exercise in managing metal overload rather than building a clear path forward.
This article explains why planning is hard now, what changed in 2025, and how to fix those three basics so your plan still makes sense when someone reads it two days later.
This piece examines why sprint planning has become so difficult, what changed in 2025 to make it worse, and most importantly, how teams can fix those three foundations so your plan still makes sense when someone who missed the meeting reads it two days later.
The mental load of modern planning
"Cognitive load" is simply the amount of mental effort a person can handle at once. Every team has a limit on how much information they can hold at any given moment, and planning meetings now push far past it.
At the same time, teams are asked to:
- Rank features against unclear goals,
- Estimate work they have not fully explored,
- Line up with platform teams whose time is uncertain,
- Balance different stakeholder requests,
- Figure out dependencies across systems they do not control, and
- Promise dates that others will track closely.
Plans are often made as if everyone is fully available and not also working on existing projects and tasks. And we all know quite well, that is never the case. When the mental load is too high, teams cannot safely own or change the software they're working on.
Planning then becomes a bottleneck where teams spend more time managing the complexity of coordination than actually coordinating. Decisions slip, assumptions go unchecked, and the plan that comes out is not a shared understanding but a weak compromise that satisfies no one.
Where priorities fail
In most planning sessions, "priority" has lost its meaning. Everything is P0. Everything is urgent. Everything needs to happen this sprint. If everything is top priority, nothing is.
Teams struggle to prioritise because there are too many moving parts at once: lots of stakeholders, long backlogs, and priorities that change week to week. Most prioritisation methods like MoSCoW, WSJF, and RICE, work for a small list and a small group, but they stop working when the list and the audience get big. Meetings get longer, scores become inconsistent, and re-ranking everything every time something changes isn’t practical. People also learn to “game” the numbers to push their item up.
There’s a second problem: these methods assume everyone agrees on what “value” means. In reality, sales, compliance, platform, design, and support often want different things. Numeric models (like simple scoring) miss those differences, because some trade-offs (like brand risk, customer trust, regulatory deadlines) are easier to discuss than to put into a single number.
A flat product backlog makes this worse. As Jeff Patton says, reading a backlog as one long list is like trying to understand a book by reading a list of sentences in random order - all the content is there, but the story is gone. Without the story, “priority” becomes a label people use to win arguments rather than a clear order of work.
Put simply, when the work and the number of voices grow, the usual techniques can’t keep up. If you don’t have a way to surface different perspectives and settle the trade-offs, decisions drift from strategy, plans keep shifting because they were never tied to outcomes, and engineers stop seeing why their work matters.
The estimation show
Teams are generally too optimistic about effort and too confident in their estimation numbers. On average, work takes about 30% longer than expected. Even when people say they’re 90% sure a range will cover the actual effort, it only does so 60–70% of the time.
Translation: confidence feels good, but it does not mean accuracy.
The deeper issue is how we estimate. It often becomes a solo guess instead of a shared check on risk.
Here's what actually happens - someone sees a work item called “Update API,” give it 5 points based on the title alone, and the team moves on. No one tests the assumptions behind the number.
Nobody talks about the auth layer changes implied by "update." Nobody brings up the database migration hiding in plain sight. Nobody checks whether the frontend team knows this change is coming.
And when those show up mid-sprint, the plan slips and trust drops.
After a few misses, behaviour shifts for the worse. People start padding their estimates - quietly rounding numbers up to feel safe. Product then starts pushing back. And estimation turns into negotiation, not learning.
A healthier signal to watch is the spread of estimates. A wide spread of estimates isn't a problem to smooth over, but rather a signal to discuss assumptions. Most likely, there will be some difference in the initial estimates, giving each team member a great opportunity to talk about why their estimates were either higher or lower than the others.
The coordination cost of dependencies
When different teams own connected parts of the system, one team’s work often can’t move until another team makes a change. If those teams aren’t lined up, the change gets stuck.
This is common when how the software is wired doesn’t match how the teams are organised.
For example, the code says “Service A must change before Service B,” but A and B live in different teams with different priorities, sprint dates, and intake rules. The code requires coordination, but the org chart doesn’t provide it.
In large organisations, these small, work item‑level links are a constant source of delay. And it has only gotten worse in recent times.
Platform engineering has grown, with most features now touching shared services - auth, data platforms, CI/CD, component libraries. But planning often happens without the platform team in the room. No one checks their capacity, no one tests the order of work, and theres no agreement on intake windows or what to do when something is blocked.
So the plan looks ready on paper. Stories are sized. The sprint is committed. Then, three days in, someone says at stand‑up: “That API won’t be ready until next Tuesday,” or “The platform team is tied up,” or “Friday’s deployment window isn’t available.” Work waits, people wait, and money burns while nothing moves forward.
Dependencies increase complexity in any system. More complexity means more idle time as work passes between people or teams. Developers, then, often end up waiting for other work to wrap up before they can begin, creating inefficiencies that add no value but still cost payroll and budget.
What changed in 2025
Three shifts in 2025 made planning even harder:
1. Distributed work reduced live coordination.
Hybrid days replaced being in the same room every day. More work happens asynchronously. That means your written plans and notes like sprint goals, story maps, dependency notes, must explain what real-time conversations used to cover: why this work matters, what comes first, what won’t fit, who’s involved, and what could block you. Vague goals that could be fixed in person now fall apart across time zones.
2. Fewer tools, one system.
Teams cut vendors to reduce spend. Planning, estimation, and retrospectives moved into one solution, whether they fit well or not. While that reduces context‑switching, it also means that teams would have to lose specialised tools and custom workflows. It also means that stakeholders can see the full line from strategy to stories in one place, so your sprint goals, estimation notes, and retro/improvement actions will be read more closely.
3. Atlassian AI raised expectations.
Atlassian expanded Rovo across Jira and Confluence. Search, governance, and automation now connect conversations to issues and speed discovery. And the thing about AI is that it accelerates whatever direction you're already pointed. If goals are fuzzy, if estimates are guesses, and if dependencies are hidden - the automation will just help you go faster in the wrong direction.
The combination of all these changes is brutal - more coordination required, less overlap to coordinate in real-time, and higher penalties when plans fail because stakeholders can now see more of the picture.
Fixing the foundations: sprint planning best practices
The teams that make planning work have rebuilt their foundations with three planning best practices. They’re simple, written rules the whole team follows. They live on the planning board and the work items, so they still make sense after hand-offs and across time zones.
1. Turn priorities into a clear order of work
“Priority” breaks when people don’t share the same idea of value. The fix is to agree on a single, visible order - why this first, then that, and what won’t fit this sprint.
Teams that get this right:
- Turn goals and outcomes into backlog work on a steady rhythm, not ad-hoc.
Once a month, product and delivery confirm objectives and break them into epics and small slices for the next 6–8 weeks. This keeps meaningful work in the pipeline without crowding the backlog assumptions and wishes that will change anyway.
- Write testable sprint goals using a consistent template.
Objective, test, constraint. Set clearly defined goals, objectives, and metrics. What is the definition of done? How will the team know if they are successful? You should leave the sprint planning meeting with a clear idea of what needs to get done and what success looks like. For example, "Users can complete checkout using saved payment methods without re-entering card details" is much better than "improve checkout UX" every time. If you can't verify whether you hit it, it's a wish, not a goal.
- Run a 30-minute review before scheduling anything.
Agree the order of work before fixing the dates. In 30 minutes with engineering, design, and platform teams: walk through the dependency list, check the capacity, and identify top risks. Output: ordered path to done, clear boundary of what won't fit that sprint, and a simple rule for how you’ll handle blocked items. This surfaces cross-team friction before it becomes a mid-sprint crisis.
- Make dependencies visible where people actually plan.
Use one standard dependency field and two to three link types in Jira. Review the highest-risk links during planning - not when they block work on day three.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm's User Story Maps makes this process concrete - Build goals and outcomes at the top, work items that connect to those goals, and sprint or version swimlanes to clearly group them. Turn on dependency lines so blockers and cross-team links show up in planning. When epics ladder to outcomes, when the order of work explains itself, and when dependencies are visible on the same board - you stop rethinking priorities and start shipping.
2. Estimate together to find risk early
Estimation is not about hitting a perfect number. It is a fast way to identify risk while you can still change scope or order. Treat it as a short, focused conversation that makes hidden assumptions visible and records what you learned.
- Estimate together, live.
Run Planning Poker from the Jira issue view so everyone sees the same title, description, acceptance criteria, designs, and attachments. Keep first votes hidden and reveal them all together (so the first number doesn’t influence the rest).
Easy Agile TeamRhythm help you run the estimation process in Jira, right where work lives. Capture the key points from the discussion in comments in the issue view. Sync the final estimate number back to Jira so your plan is based on current reality, and not old guesses from two weeks ago.
- Record the reasoning, not just the number.
If a story moves from a 3 to an 8 after discussion, add two short notes on the work item:
- What changed in the conversation (the assumption you uncovered), and
- What’s still unknown (the risk you’re facing)
This helps the next person who picks it up and stops you repeating the same debate later.
- Stick to clear, simple scales.
Time estimates vary a lot by person. Story points help teams agree on the effort instead. If you ask each team member to estimate the amount of time involved in a task, chances are you'll get 5+ different answers. Timing depends on experience and understanding. But most team members will agree on the effort required to complete a work item, which means you can reach a consensus and move on with your story mapping or sprint planning much more quickly.
Maintain a small set of recent work items (easy/medium/hard) with estimates and actuals. When debates don't seem to end, point to this known work: "This looks like that auth refactor from June - that was an 8 and took six days including the migration script."
- Limit committed work at roughly 80-85% of average capacity.
The space makes room for one improvement item, for unavoidable interrupts, and for reality. Setting unachievable goals sets your whole team up for failure. Failing to meet your sprint goals sprint after sprint is damaging for team motivation and morale. Use estimates to set reasonable goals as best you can. Consider team capacity, based on your past knowledge of how long tasks take to complete, how the team works, and potential roadblocks that could arise along the way.
Protect honesty in the estimate numbers. An estimate is a shared view of scope and risk, not a target to enforce. If it needs to change, change it after a team conversation - don’t override it. Remember what we said earlier - when estimation turns into negotiation, people start “padding” (quietly inflating a number to feel safe), and accuracy gets worse.
3. Closed the loop on improvements
Teams often fall into the trap of writing retrospective items as good intentions and not clear actions. Broad notes like “improve communication” or “fix our process” sound fine on paper, but they don’t tell anyone what to do next.
Action items are often ignored during a retrospective. Everyone focuses on engaging people in getting their ideas out, and not as much time is spent on the action items and what's going to be done or changed as a result.
- Start every retro by checking last sprint’s actions.
Ten minutes. Did we close them? If closed, did they help? What did we learn? This way, the team acts on what they learned straight away and everyone can see what changed.
- Turn insights into Jira work items immediately.
Each action needs an owner, a due date, a link to the related work, and a clear definition of done. If you can’t assign it immediately, it’s not actionable, it’s a complaint.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm's Retrospective lives right inside Jira, attached to your board. Turn retrospective items into Jira issues with owners and dates, link them to an epic or backlog item, and slot at least one into the next sprint. Track incomplete action items and repeating themes on the same page as delivery work.
- Make space for one improvement item every sprint.
Pick one action item for a sprint and finish it before starting another, so it doesn't get pushed aside by feature work. Treat action items like a feature: estimate it, track it, and close it with a note about the result and impact.
- Write a short impact note when you close an action.
A retro should give people energy. It should help them see that we're improving, that their voice matters, that something got better because of something they said.
Write a one-line impact note for every closed action item, ideally with a small metric - for example, "Batched PR reviews into two daily slots - median review time dropped from six hours to 90 minutes." This teaches the next team, justifies the investment, and shows that retro action items increase the team's capacity to deliver, and are not admin overheads.
What changes when you follow the planning best practices
Teams with solid sprint planning foundations rarely talk about them. They’re not on stage explaining their process. They’re just shipping steady work while everyone else wonders what their secret is.
There is no secret. The best teams have simply stopped treating planning as a meeting to survive and started treating it as a system of best practices that compound over time.
The mental load of planning sessions does not go away. But it shifts. Instead of processing all of it live in a room under time pressure, these teams have recorded their answers into written plans and notes that do the thinking for them.
The user story map explains what matters and why. The order of work shows dependencies before they block work. The estimation scores and notes capture not just numbers but the assumptions behind them. Retro action items sit next to product work, so the next sprint benefits from what the last one learned.
Fix the best practices and your sprint planning challenges will reduce. Not perfectly. Not forever. But enough that planning stops feeling like a crisis and starts feeling like what it should be: a calm view of what is possible now, with simple ways to adjust as you learn.
The cost of unclear plans is rising. AI speeds up what you feed it. Stakeholders can see more details easily. Work happens across time zones. In that world, clarity isn't a nice-to-have - it's a basic requirement.
The teams that will do well in 2026 aren't the ones with better tools or smarter frameworks. They’ll be the ones with a few simple best practices written into the plan and the work items, so handovers are easy, others can check and understand them, and they still make sense after the meeting.
Related Articles
WorkflowThe Ultimate Agile Sprint Planning Guide
How do you feel when someone mentions “planning”? Do you look forward to the opportunity or does the thought of making a plan send you running for the hills?
Sprint planning is a crucial part of the agile sprint cycle. It helps you and your team align around common goals, and sets you up for a successful sprint. Even if planning isn’t one of your strengths, the good news is that you can practice and get better over time with the help of some good advice.
We’ve combined our best sprint planning tips into an ultimate guide to agile sprint planning, with everything you need to run efficient and effective planning meetings.
What is agile sprint planning?
Agile sprint planning is a key ceremony in the agile sprint cycle. It signifies and prepares the team for the start of the sprint. Without this planning, there is a very real risk that the team would lack focus and fail to align on what is most important.
Effective agile sprint planning has three key parts; a sprint goal, an understanding of team capacity, and a prioritized set of backlog items. Each element depends on the other for success.
The idea is to align your team around a goal for the next sprint by agreeing on a set of backlog items that are achievable within the sprint and contribute to reaching the sprint goal. Gaining focus and clarity on what you plan to achieve will help your team to work better together and to deliver on objectives.
It is best to start with an agreed sprint goal. You can then prioritize work on the specific set of backlog items that your team has the capacity to complete, and that will contribute to making your sprint goal a reality.
How sprint planning fits within the Scrum process
We’re big fans of the Scrum process, and it’s hugely popular with many software development teams. While agile sprint planning can take many forms within the different agile methodologies, for the purposes of this guide, we’ll focus on agile sprint planning within the Scrum framework.
If your team doesn’t follow Scrum don’t worry — you’ll still find value in our preparation tips, meeting guide, mistakes to avoid, and sprint planning resources.
💡 Learn more: What's the Difference Between Kanban vs. Scrum?
Scrum roles: The people
There are three main roles within a Scrum team.
- Product Owner
- Scrum Master
- Development team
The Product Owner puts in the work upfront. They help prioritize the product backlog items and decide which should move to the sprint backlog. These important decisions guide the goals of the sprint and determine the tasks the team will tackle over the next sprint.
The Scrum Master acts as a guide, they lead meetings that help ensure that the Scrum framework is followed throughout the sprint to keep the team on track. The Scrum Master helps the team get the most out of the entire Scrum process and each individual Scrum ceremony.
The development team is made up of the various people who will complete the work agreed upon during sprint planning.
There are others that you might refer to during sprint planning, such as stakeholders, users, and customers. While these aren’t technically Scrum roles, they play a critical role in product development. Stakeholders should be brought into the process early and often, and customers should always be top-of-mind when making any development decisions. Some teams find User Personas to be a valuable way of keeping user value in focus.
Artifacts: What gets done
Artifacts are the things to get done — different breakdowns of what the team hopes to accomplish:
- Product backlog
- Sprint backlog
- Increments
Product backlog items are the tasks the team believes they need to accomplish in order to complete a product or specific improvement of a product. It is the big master list of everything that the team thinks they need to accomplish. The product backlog is flexible and iterative, and it will evolve as the team learns more about the product, stakeholder feedback, and customer needs.
The sprint backlog is more focused than the product backlog. The product owner moves the most important backlog items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog at the beginning of each sprint based on current issues, priorities, and customer needs. The team aims to complete all of the sprint backlog items over the course of the sprint.
An increment is a concrete stepping stone toward reaching the Product Goal. An increment must be verified as usable in order to provide value, which means that any work completed cannot be considered part of an increment unless it meets the Definition of Done (an agreement among the team of what “done” means). This is a formal description of the state of the increment when it meets the quality standards required of a product. Once the work completed satisfies the agreed Definition of Done, you gain an increment.
Scrum ceremonies: Where Sprint Planning fits
There are a number of ceremonies in Scrum that occur each sprint. This is where sprint planning fits within the Scrum process.
- Sprint planning
- Daily scrum (or standup)
- Sprint review
- Sprint retrospective
💡 Learn more: Agile Ceremonies: Your Guide to the Four Stages
Sprint planning is the first Scrum ceremony — it prepares the team for the sprint. The planning session sets everything into motion, aligning the team on what’s most important for this sprint. This is when decisions are made and key backlog items are moved from the product backlog to the sprint backlog.
The second ceremony repeats every day of the sprint. Daily standups bring the team together to discuss progress and blockers that might be getting in the way. By getting the concerns out in the open early, the team can avoid the frustration of delays and ensure work continues to flow.
The final two ceremonies happen at the end of the sprint. For the sprint review, the team comes together to determine the success of the sprint based on the “Done” work completed. It’s also a chance to bring in stakeholders to gather feedback on what's been accomplished so far. The sprint review ensures customer insights are always top-of-mind, stakeholders continually see progress, and guarantees the product never strays too far from what the stakeholders are looking for.
The sprint retrospective gathers critical insights from team members about how the sprint went. What went well, what didn’t go so well, and what could be improved upon for next time? These valuable insights are what makes Scrum agile — the team is always thinking critically about the process and looking for ways to improve the work and how they work together.
We’ll talk about these ceremonies in more detail below when we discuss what happens after the sprint planning meeting.
The benefits of agile sprint planning
Agile sprint planning is a powerful meeting that should not be overlooked or underestimated. It is an opportunity to:
- Bring the whole team together and align around common goals
- Set context by starting the sprint with clear priorities
- Identify potential roadblocks before they occur
- Bring stakeholder feedback into the planning process
- Learn from previous sprints by considering sprint review and retrospective insights
- Consider team capacity and adjust accordingly to ensure that goals are achievable and that the team isn’t overcommitted in the upcoming sprint
- Account and plan for dependencies that may impact the flow of work.
How to prepare for a sprint planning meeting
We know we said that a sprint begins with sprint planning, but there are actually a few important steps you must take in order to prepare for the planning session. Unfortunately, you do need to do a little planning for the planning meeting.
Backlog refinement
Backlog grooming or refinement keeps your backlog healthy, up-to-date, and ready for sprint planning. A refined backlog will help ensure your team’s planning time is used efficiently and effectively since you won't have to waste time adding details to the backlog that could have been completed in advance before everyone came together.
The product manager should groom the backlog a few days before the sprint planning meeting to make sure it’s ready.
Tips for maintaining a healthy backlog:
- Ensure stories are in order of priority
- Prioritize items that bring the customer the most value
- Add detail to the highest-priority backlog items
- Split any user stories that are too big
- Delete any user stories that aren’t relevant anymore
- Create new user stories based on new or clearer needs
- Add items based on new stakeholder feedback
- Make adjustments based on bug fixes
- Assign more accurate estimates
💡 Learn more: Essential Checklist for Effective Backlog Refinement (and What To Avoid)
Be consistent
A consistent meeting time that’s scheduled well in advance will ensure that the entire Scrum team keeps the time slot open. Book your sprint planning meeting on the same day and at the same time every sprint so that no one forgets or double books.
Sprint planning is not a meeting to be shuffled around, delayed, or ignored — sprint planning meetings are essential to the success of every sprint. Ask your team about a specific, recurring time to meet, and ensure it works for everyone.
How to run a sprint planning meeting
While the agile method is flexible and collaborative, it isn’t chaotic; everything needs to begin with a plan.
1. Stick to a set sprint planning meeting duration
As with any kind of meeting, the team can be easily sidetracked without a timebox. After all, talking about the work that needs to be completed is often easier than actually completing it. It’s the Scrum Master’s job to keep the team on track and make sure the time limit isn’t exceeded.
Go into the sprint planning meeting well-prepared; a clear agenda and a well-refined backlog mean your team can get straight to planning.
Set a realistic timebox for the meeting and stick to it. We recommend that you avoid scheduling more than 2-3 hours for a sprint planning meeting, but as you become more skilled in sprint planning, you’ll better understand the length of time that works for you and your team.
2. Use estimates to make realistic decisions
You want your team to be as productive as possible, but overloading them can actually hinder productivity and focus. Unreasonable expectations are demotivating and overcommitted team members are more likely to make mistakes.
You need to understand the effort and time it will take to complete the goals you set out to accomplish for each sprint. Agile estimation techniques and story points provide a better understanding of team capacity, individual capacity, and what a reasonable workload looks like. Reasonable and realistic goals will help your team stay motivated and support a consistent flow of work.
3. Define clear goals and outcomes
What does the team aim to accomplish between now and the end of the sprint? Set clearly defined goals and outcomes that everyone understands. Do your goals align with what you learned from past sprints? Do they align with customer needs? Does everyone agree on what the next sprint will (roughly) look like?
Don’t assume that everyone is on the same page. Ask questions and encourage your team to speak up if anything is unclear. It’s better to clear up discrepancies or misunderstandings now rather than once the work begins.
Setting sprint goals effectively involves following the SMART framework, a well-regarded strategy in project management and goal-setting across various industries. The acronym SMART stands for:
- Specific: Clearly define what you aim to achieve. Avoid vague goals by pinpointing precise outcomes.
- Measurable: Establish criteria for measuring progress. This helps in tracking accomplishments and identifying areas that need adjustment.
- Achievable: Aim for goals that are challenging yet attainable with the resources at hand. Overambitious targets can demoralize a team if not realistic.
- Relevant: Ensure that each goal aligns with the broader objectives of the project. Irrelevant tasks can divert energy from what's truly important.
- Time-bound: Set a clear deadline to maintain urgency and focus. Sprint goals must coincide with the sprint’s limited timeline to ensure timely completion.
In practice, applying the SMART framework to sprint goals means your team is synchronized and focused on priorities that drive the project forward efficiently. By keeping goals relevant and achievable within the sprint's timeframe, you avoid misallocation of efforts and ensure progress is aligned with overall project ambitions.
Post your sprint goal somewhere that is easily accessible so that the team can refer back to it throughout the sprint.
💡 Learn more: How to Make the Most of Your Sprint Goals
4. Decide what it means to be ‘done’
What does “done” mean for any given backlog item, increment, product issue, or product as a whole? The team and your stakeholders need to agree on what done looks like in order to set realistic goals that meet the expectations of everyone involved.
As you set goals and choose which backlog items to complete for the next sprint, be clear about what it means to meet and complete the goals you want to accomplish.
5. Align sprint goals with product goals
Sprint goals should always align with your broader product goals. Your sprint may take a specific direction depending on current product issues, bug fixes, or customer concerns, but it’s important to keep an eye on the big picture.
Choose backlog items with care — make sure they relate to the larger product goal and that each works in sync to move development forward. Overlooking product goals in sprint planning could mean that each sprint looks more like a random selection of to-do lists that don’t connect back to customer needs, relate to product goals, or help you reach important increments. The result will feel like a lack of progress, which risks disengaging the team and other important stakeholders, like your users.
What happens next?
Now that the planning is done, you’re ready to implement your plan and complete the work. But that doesn’t mean that team members go off and work in isolation.
Daily scrum (or stand-up)
The daily scrum or stand-up is an opportunity for a collaborative agile team to maintain progress. It should be a quick check-in at the start of each day.
The team will discuss what has been done in the past 24 hours, any roadblocks they might have hit, and what the team hopes to accomplish the next day.
This critical check-in helps the team stay on the same page, helps to ensure the continued flow of work, and keeps the team on track to achieve sprint goals.
Sprint review
A sprint review meeting takes place at the end of a sprint. It's a chance for the team to review all of the “Done” issues for that period. The sprint review determines whether or not the goal for the sprint was achieved.
It’s a chance to demonstrate shippable working product increments to the team, and also an opportunity to bring in stakeholder feedback. This feedback gives you valuable insights to assess if you’re on the right track, or need to make changes in the next sprint. The sprint review is also excellent preparation for the next backlog grooming and sprint planning session.
💡 Learn more: Introduction to Sprint Reviews
Sprint retrospective
While the sprint review looks at what was accomplished and how to move forward, the retrospective examines your processes and how the team is working together.
What did you learn during the previous sprint? While retrospectives can take many forms, the goal is to discover what worked well, what didn't go so well, and what could be improved upon next time. Your team will use the insights gathered in the retrospective to improve how you work together and deliver value to customers in the future.
💡 Learn more: 5 Steps to Holding Effective Sprint Retrospectives
Agile sprint planning mistakes
It’s easy to fall into bad habits, especially as deadlines and product launch dates approach. Avoid these common agile planning mistakes to ensure your team is always making the most of the agile methodology and the Scrum process.
Unrealistic expectations
Choosing unattainable goals sets your whole team up for failure. Failing to meet your sprint goals sprint after sprint is damaging for team motivation and morale.
Use estimates to set reasonable goals as best you can. Consider team capacity, factoring in your past knowledge of how long tasks take to complete, how the team works, and potential roadblocks that could arise along the way.
Lack of context
Your team will benefit from an understanding of how the issues they’re working on fit into the bigger picture.
Depending on the tool you’re using to plan and manage your work, it can be difficult to see the contextual detail needed to plan and work with clarity. The more items you have, the more difficult and overwhelming it will be to organize and prioritize. Use tools that allow you to add context, depth, and customer insights with clean functionality to adapt your plan to the needs of your team and stakeholders.
Neglecting your backlog
We mentioned this point when we talked about what you need to do to prepare for sprint planning. It’s worth mentioning again because it’s a common mistake.
When you go into a sprint planning meeting without a well-managed backlog, you lack the clarity you need to plan effectively. Your time is valuable, and so is the time of your team, so it should be treated with care and used effectively.
A well-managed backlog is DEEP:
- Detailed appropriately
- Estimated
- Emergent
- Prioritized
💡 Learn more: The 4 Characteristics of a Good Product Backlog
Not allowing the plan to adapt
When you plan your sprint, you’ll do everything you can to prioritize the most important tasks for the length of the sprint. It’s important to try to stick to the plan as best you can, but you also need to adapt as you acquire new information.
Be ready to make changes on the fly should you hit roadblocks or acquire new information about customer needs, concerns, or product issues.
Failing to understand stakeholders
You need to understand the goals and priorities of stakeholders to be successful. Just because you’re happy with what you’ve accomplished doesn't mean your stakeholders will too.
Ensure your stakeholders are brought into your process early and often and help them understand how you work to provide them value. Gather feedback from stakeholders regularly to ensure your goals are aligned. A good time for this is during the sprint review. Just make sure those insights are transferred over to your next planning meeting.
Not choosing tools with a customer-centric approach
Successful product development delivers what the customer needs and wants. To build for your customers, it helps to use tools for planning and work management that makes it easy to keep them top-of-mind. Incorporating user story maps and customer personas into your planning helps you and your team prioritize the work that will deliver the most value first.
💡 Learn more: 10 tips for more effective user personas
Failing to incorporate retrospective insights into planning
Retrospectives are the best thing you can do to help your team work better together. During a retrospective, you're asking your team to be open and honest about how things went over the course of the sprint so that you can learn from each other.
Failing to learn from those insights means that the collective time spent in the retrospective has been wasted, and the feedback that your team has shared is devalued.
Incorporating the learnings you gain from a retrospective into your next planning session and into the next sprint, will support your team to improve every time, helping them gain work satisfaction and deliver better outcomes.
Virtual vs. in-person sprint planning
The advantages of remote work also bring challenges for collaborative planning. No matter the way your team chooses to meet, whether virtually, in person, or a combination of both, it’s important that you choose tools that meet the needs of your team.
Tips for virtual sprint planning:
- Be really prepared - communicate plans clearly ahead of time, so that everyone has clear expectations.
- Use a video conferencing tool that allows for breakout sessions
- Set up the interactive online resources you plan to use and include links in the meeting request.
- Online discussions don’t start as naturally as they would in person, so share discussion topics ahead of time, and consider preparing some ice-breakers.
- Ensure that you’ve accounted for time differences for teams that span time zones.
- Tech issues arise no matter how much advanced planning and testing you do. Always expect the unexpected.
Tips for in-person sprint planning:
- Book a meeting room with plenty of space for your team, and consider separate spaces for breakout sessions.
- Ensure that your meeting room will accommodate a shared view of your sprint plan - do you need a wall for sticky notes, or a screen to share a digital tool?
- If some of your team members work remotely, it’s difficult to involve them in the same way, so consider how this might work for your team. They won’t be able to read a whiteboard or sticky notes as easily, so a digital solution may be best.
- If you choose to plan your sprint ‘on the wall’, be sure to nominate someone to transcribe your plan into your work management tool at the end of the planning meeting.
No matter where your planning takes place, always remember to prepare your backlog ahead of time so that you can have focused and informed discussions during sprint planning.
Additional agile resources
We’re continually adding to our content library, which is filled with resources, how-to guides, product updates, and more.
📚 Add these to your list:
- Easy Agile Podcast Ep.20: The importance of the Team Retrospective
- Easy Agile Podcast Ep.18 Top qualities of an agile leader and team
- Easy Agile Podcast Ep.16 Enabling high performing agile teams with Adaptavist
- Being agile vs doing agile
- The Ultimate Guide to User Story Mapping
- The Ultimate Guide to Buyer Personas
- The Ultimate Guide to PI Planning [2022 SAFe Edition]
Using Easy Agile to improve sprint planning
Make your sprint planning smooth and effective with Easy Agile TeamRhythm. Transform your flat product backlog into a dynamic, flexible, and visual representation of the work to be done. Seamlessly integrated with Jira, with TeamRhythm you can:
- View your Jira stories, tasks, and bugs in context, aligned beneath their epics on the story map
- Drag and drop Jira issues from the backlog into a sprint
- Create new issues right on the story map
- Estimate issues on the story map, and gauge capacity with story point totals in each sprint swimlane
- Publish the sprint goal on each sprint swimlane, so it’s always top of mind
- Use filters to focus on the stories and issues that are most important now
- Group epics by a third level of hierarchy, to easily see how the work in focus contributes to the bigger picture
Easy Agile TeamRhythm also supports team retrospectives, with flexible and intuitive retrospectives boards created for every sprint. You can add retrospective items right from the sprint swimlane, so you don’t forget any important points. And you can turn retrospective action items into Jira issues that can be scheduled for future sprints, so you’re always getting better at what you do, and delivering for your customers.
Thanks for reading our ultimate agile sprint planning guide! If you have any questions about this guide, our other content, or our products, reach out to our team at any time. We love hearing from you.
We’ll continue to update this guide as we gain more agile planning insights, techniques, tools, and best practices.
Agile Best PracticeHow To Avoid These 6 Agile Planning Mistakes
Planning is a critical phase of the agile process; it's an opportunity to align on priorities as team and organize work in a sequence that will help it run smoothly. The planning process helps agile software development and other product development teams sort through new information, adapt to dependencies, and address evolving customer needs.
Agile is the opposite of traditional waterfall project planning, which takes a step-by-step approach. Waterfall has dominated project planning for many years, with detailed plans laid out at the beginning of a project that had to be adhered to rigidly. This may move a project or product forward, but it neglects to account for any new developments that could occur outside of the “master plan.”
Agile is an iterative process that helps teams reduce waste and maximize efficiency for the ultimate goal of bringing value to customers. This customer-first approach helps teams make informed choices throughout the development process — choices that continually and consistently provide value to stakeholders.
One of the greatest advantages of an iterative agile approach is that it enables early feedback from stakeholders. You don’t need to guess whether or not you’re making the right decisions — you can find out every step of the way by directly including stakeholders in your process. You can adapt your plan as you need to based on what will provide the most value to customers at any time.
Even if you are part of a seasoned agile team, there are always opportunities for improvement and processes to fine-tune. This post will outline some unproductive agile planning mistakes teams make, including how agile teams can avoid these common pitfalls.
Agile Planning Mistake #1: Not being on the same page as stakeholders
Do you involve stakeholders in your planning process? Do they understand your goals and why you are making each decision? Working directly with stakeholders, both internal stakeholders and the users of your product, will help you gain a clear view of both needs and constraints, and give you the information you need to determine what should be done when.
It's never a good idea to rest on assumptions. Your stakeholders live in a different world than the one you are deeply embedded in, with different priorities and assumptions of their own. So that you can produce deliverables that meet stakeholder expectations, you need to agree on what those expectations are. Involve your stakeholders in planning, but ensure everyone understands that expectations could evolve throughout the process based on new information gained from successes, failures, and customer responses.
Agile Planning Mistake #2: Not accounting for dependencies
Failing to account for dependencies in agile planning leads to bottlenecks, delayed releases, and undermines team collaboration. Collaboration within and across teams is needed for a business to deliver effectively. When multiple teams are working on interconnected features, if one team’s progress is blocked by another, the entire development cycle slows down. Without clear visibility of dependencies, work can be delayed and deadlines missed.
To minimize and avoid disruption to the flow of work, take the time to consult with stakeholders and anticipate dependencies early. Tools that help you visualise and map dependencies, and shared roadmaps to track cross-team dependencies, allow you to share an understanding of dependencies and sequence work in a way that avoids roadblocks. Proactively managing dependencies ensures smoother iterations, faster time-to-market, and a more predictable agile process.
Agile Planning Mistake #3: Using bland, flat product maps
Flat product backlogs are bland and boring 😴. Think carrot cake without icing. They lack the detail and functionality needed to realize the full story of your product backlog.
Plus, once you have more than a handful of items, they become overwhelming and difficult to organize in a meaningful way. It becomes less clear which item is the most important and more difficult to ensure your decisions align with the larger goal of the project.
When you plan out your roadmap, it needs context, and you must be able to clearly see the customer journey. User story maps visualize the customer journey in the planning process and throughout the entire process of product development. They utilize user stories — the smallest unit of work that can bring value to the customer — so you can plan and organize the backlog from the customer’s perspective.
📕 Read our ultimate guide to user story maps to learn more.
Agile Planning Mistake #4: Not allowing the plan to live, breathe, and adapt
As we've already discussed, agile is an iterative approach. This means your agile planning needs to leave room for changes. Your plan should be able to grow and adapt as you progress with each sprint or product roadmap.
At the beginning of a sprint, you lack the information needed to see the full picture. You don’t have everything you need to build the perfect solution, and that’s okay. It’s all part of the process. Spending hours or days trying to iron out the perfect plan just wastes time that could be better spent learning and solving problems as they come. What you thought would provide the most value during the planning phase could be completely different down the track.
You may need to alter your plan after a roadblock comes up in a daily stand-up, or you may learn about a customer concern that completely changes your direction. Iterations are inevitable and welcomed! They help you keep pace with incoming information as you learn from each other, stakeholders, and your customers.
Agile planning isn’t a promise. It’s an outline that will help you reach your goal, and that changes with your goals and circumstances.
Agile Planning Mistake #5: Not incorporating retrospective insights in the following planning session
Retrospectives are an essential piece of the agile process. They give teams a chance to reflect on everything that occurred in an individual sprint or after the completion of a product.
An effective retrospective asks the entire team key questions that can improve the process next time around. What went well? What’s worth repeating again? What didn’t go so well? What could be improved upon next time? What roadblocks or dependencies developed? What did you learn? How did you feel at the end of the sprint?
A retrospective provides insights that will improve efficiency, teamwork and team dynamics, the effectiveness of tools, and communication with stakeholders.
Simply holding a retrospective or collecting retrospective feedback is not enough to gain value. You need to ensure you’re incorporating the feedback into the following sprint planning meeting, and take action that leads to meaningful improvement. The next iteration will be all the better for the time you spend reflecting and improving based upon what you learned.
Agile Planning Mistake #6: Choosing tools that don’t take a customer-centric approach
Whether your team uses a Scrum process, kanban boards, or other agile methods, the tools you choose should always be customer-focused. And you need to continue using them in a way that keeps the customer at the forefront of decision making.
Teams can fall into a trap believing they’re focusing on the customer when they aren’t doing much of anything beyond following simple agile methods and generic processes. Customers need to be embedded in your development process right from the planning phase so that every decision a team member makes considers customer needs first.
Choose planning tools that help your entire team get to the heart of what makes your customers tick, and always check in to ensure you are making decisions in line with your customers.
For example, Personas provide a deep understanding of what customers want, need, don’t want, etc. They reveal key information about customer pain points, desires, demographics, goals, shopping patterns, and much more. We highly suggest developing customer Personas to get a rich picture of all the people who will use your product, but it’s not enough to just have Personas lying around.
You need to bring these Personas into your agile planning process and keep them front and center as you complete issues and continue to develop your product.
Agile Best Practice9 Tips to Help You Ace Your Sprint Planning Meetings
The sprint planning meeting helps agile teams plan and get on the same page about each sprint. It’s an opportunity to decide on prioritization based on the product vision, issue urgency, stakeholder feedback, and knowledge from the previous sprint.
The goal of the meeting is to determine which backlog items should be tackled during the upcoming sprint. The team, guided by the product owner and Scrum Master, decide which items from the product backlog should be moved to the sprint backlog for hopeful completion over the coming weeks (sprint duration).
Sprint planning plays a critical role in the Scrum process. The meeting ensures teams enter a sprint prepared, with work items chosen carefully. The end result should be a shared understanding of sprint goals that will guide the next sprint.
While sprint planning should occur before any type of sprint, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on sprint planning sessions for Scrum teams. Continue reading to learn our top tips for a successful sprint planning meeting. 🎉
How does the sprint planning meeting fit into the Scrum framework?
Scrum is a hugely popular agile methodology used in product development. The process involves a series of sprints that are improved upon and adjusted based on continual feedback from customers, stakeholders, and team members.
The sprint planning meeting sees the entire team comes together to decide what work they hope to complete over the upcoming sprint. The product owner helps decide which priority product backlog items move to the sprint backlog. This is an incredibly important phase that guides the team’s goals over the next two weeks.
The Scrum Master acts as a Scrum guide. They help the development team stay on track in each sprint, ensuring everyone gets the most out of the process. The Scrum team works together to complete the amount of work decided on during sprint planning. To ensure everyone remains on track and on the same page, daily stand-ups are held each day. This provides an opportunity for team members to address any issues or potential bottlenecks that could keep work from running smoothly.
Following the sprint, a sprint review takes place, which gives stakeholders an opportunity to provide feedback. Finally, a sprint retrospective meeting gives the team an opportunity to assess and improve upon their process. The Scrum concludes and begins again with another sprint planning meeting.
Here are some tips to make sure each sprint planning meeting sets you up for success:
1. Reserve the same time for sprint planning ⏰
Book your sprint planning meeting on the same day and at the same time every two weeks to ensure your entire team keeps that time slot available. Sprint planning is vital to the success of each sprint — it’s a meeting that shouldn’t be shuffled around.
Pick a time that works for everyone involved, asking for feedback from your team about when is best. Schedule the meetings well in advance in everyone's calendar so that no one forgets about it or books other engagements.
2. Set a sprint planning meeting duration and stick to it ⏳
Sprint planning is important, but that doesn’t mean it should take forever. Set a time limit for your meeting, and do your best to stick to it. If you are well prepared with an agenda and refined backlog, you should be able to get straight to planning.
We recommend scheduling no more than 2-4 hours for sprint planning. Let the Scrum Master be in charge of ensuring the team stays on track and completes planning in the allotted time.
3. Complete backlog refinement before sprint planning begins 📝
Complete your backlog refinement ahead of your sprint planning meeting. Otherwise, you will spend far too much time adding details, estimating, or splitting work.
The sprint planning meeting should be reserved for planning and goal setting. While the backlog shouldn’t be set in stone, it should provide team members with enough details to move forward with planning instead of refinement.
4. Incorporate stakeholder feedback from the sprint review 😍
What insights did stakeholders share throughout the sprint or during the sprint review? You are designing this product for them, so incorporating their feedback is crucial to the end result.
Make sure every decision is based on customer needs. After each sprint, share your product goals and sprint goals with your stakeholders and adjust per their feedback.
5. Incorporate sprint retrospective insights 💡
Sprint retrospectives are a critical part of the agile process, providing a time for the team to discuss how they can improve. There are lessons to be learned every time you complete a sprint or iteration. Agile continually takes what a team learns and turns those experiences into actionable improvements. So, ignoring these lessons would be very un-agile of you. 🤔
How did the last sprint go? Was each team member satisfied with the process, and what was accomplished? What changes did your team decide would make the next sprint more effective? Use these insights to make each sprint better than the last one.
6. Clearly define what success looks like ✅
Set clearly defined goals, objectives, and metrics. What is the definition of done? How will the team know if they are successful? You should leave the sprint planning meeting with a clear idea of what needs to get done and what success looks like.
7. Use estimates to make decisions based on team capacity 📈
Overloading your team or any individual beyond their capacity does far more harm than good. The team will be more likely to make mistakes, and morale will diminish as goals remain consistently out of reach.
Use agile estimation techniques and story points to better understand workload and capacity. How much work and effort is needed to accomplish your goals? Ensure you set realistic and reasonable goals based on your best estimations.
8. Align sprint goals with overall product goals 🎉
Ensure you have a goal for the sprint and that all backlog items relate to the end goal. Your sprint goals should work alongside your overall product goals.
Failing to prioritize your objectives can result in a random selection of to-dos. Completing disconnected backlog items will still get work done, but it will result in unexpected outcomes and a low sense of accomplishment for the team. Each backlog item should be chosen with a clear purpose that relates to your product and sprint goals.
9. Leave room for flexibility 💫
Any agile methodology is flexible by nature, and Scrum is no exception. If there isn’t room for flexibility, something has gone seriously wrong.
It's important to acknowledge that not everything will always go to plan. You will continually find new information, stakeholder insights, and dependencies that the team will need to adjust to along the way. Ensure the team understands they need to be flexible and that they are supported throughout each sprint.
Sprint planning made easy
The effectiveness of sprint planning can make or break the coming week for a Scrum team. It’s important for the development team to take the necessary time to prepare for each upcoming sprint. This means going into the meeting with clear goals, objectives, stakeholder feedback, and a refined backlog.
Make the most of your sprint planning and do it with ease using Easy Agile TeamRhythm. Transform your flat product maps into dynamic, flexible, and visual representations of the customer journey. Story points will help your team make decisions and account for capacity while keeping the customer top-of-mind.
Learn more about the benefits of user story mapping and read our ultimate guide to user story maps.