Sprint Planning

TL;DR

‍Agile estimation challenges are rarely about the number. Planning poker is useful when teams treat vote spreads as signals about scope, risk, and dependencies. Software team alignment during estimation improves sprint predictability more than chasing velocity. Velocity alone cannot forecast capacity because context changes across sprints. Coordination work must live in Jira as first-class items, or retro actions will not get done. Easy Agile TeamRhythm keeps planning and estimation in one place: story mapping for sequence, planning poker on the issue for shared context, and retrospective actions that turn into tracked work. The new ebook, Guide to Building Predictable Delivery with Jira in 2026, explains how to plan with clarity, align on effort, and turn problems into progress. The outcome is fewer rollovers, clearer handoffs, and more reliable delivery.

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Estimation in software teams has become a performance ritual. Planning poker sessions run smoothly, story points get assigned, and even velocity charts trend upward.

Yet research analysing 82 studies found five recurring reasons why estimates fail: information quality, team dynamics, estimation practices, project management, and business influences.

The point is, the problem with estimations runs deeper than accuracy - it's about what teams miss whilst focusing on the number.

When a team estimates a story and three people say it's a 3 whilst two say it's an 8, that spread contains more value than whatever final number they settle on. The disagreement signals different assumptions about scope, reveals hidden dependencies, exposes risks before code gets written. But most teams treat the spread as a problem to resolve rather than intelligence to extract. They discuss just long enough to reach consensus, record the number, move on.

The estimation ritual runs perfectly, while the coordination that estimation should enable never happens.

Why the number misses the point

Communication, team expertise, and composition decide how reliable an estimation will be, far more than the technique itself.

A team of senior engineers who've worked together for years will generate different estimates than a newly formed team with mixed experience, even looking at identical work. Neither set is wrong - they reflect different realities.

Problems emerge when organisations ignore this context and treat estimates as objective measurements.

Story points get summed across teams. Velocity gets compared across squads. Estimates meant to help one group coordinate become data points in dashboards, stripped of the shared understanding that gave them meaning.

What planning poker actually reveals

Planning poker works when teams use it to promote collaboration, uncover risks, and address uncertainties proactively. Those benefits vanish when teams rush past disagreement to reach a number.

Someone who estimates low might:

• Know a shortcut from previous work
• Have solved something similar before
• Understand a technical approach others haven't considered

Someone who estimates high might:

• Have spotted an integration challenge
• Questioned an assumption in the requirements
• Remembered something that broke last time
• Identified a missing dependency

Both pieces of knowledge matter more than splitting the difference.

Teams that skip this interrogation lose their only reliable way to discover what they don't yet know. Later, when work takes longer than estimated, they blame the estimation technique. They should blame the coordination failure that happened during estimation.

How team members add context

Research indicates that even team members whose skills aren't needed for an item contribute valuable questions during planning poker.

The database person asks about data volume. The designer notices a missing edge case. The platform maintainer flags a version incompatibility.

None of them are trying to make the estimate bigger to protect themselves. They're raising legitimate technical considerations that affect how much work is actually involved. These questions reveal real complexity the team needs to account for. That's different from someone saying "Let's call it an 8 instead of a 5, just to be safe" without any specific reason (that's called "padding", and a team must avoid that at all costs).

When estimation becomes a solo activity or a quick management decision, all that context disappears. Work looks simpler than it is, not because anyone lied, but because key voices never got heard.

Why team coordination matters more at scale

Coordination ranks as one of the biggest challenges in large-scale software projects, particularly with complex codebases and multiple teams working simultaneously. As organisations scale, coordination problems increase:

• Dependencies multiply across teams. What used to be a conversation between two people in the same room now requires checking another team's roadmap, finding out who owns a component, and waiting for their sprint to align with yours.
• Handoffs increase between specialists. A feature that one full-stack developer could build now needs a frontend specialist, a backend specialist, a platform engineer, and a data analyst - each working on different schedules with different priorities.
• The margin for error shrinks. When you're coordinating work across five teams instead of one, a single miscommunication or missed dependency can block multiple teams at once, not just delay one work item.
• Assumptions travel further from their source. The product manager who spoke to the customer isn't in the room when the backend developer makes a technical decision. The context that shaped the original requirement gets lost through layers of handoffs and documentation.

Estimation sessions are often the only moment when everyone involved in delivering work actually talks about it before starting. Treating that time as a box-checking exercise to produce velocity data is one of the biggest mistake you could make as a team.

When estimates protect plans instead of revealing risks

Let's look at a familiar scenario. A team commits to eight features based on historical velocity. Three sprints in, two features ship and the rest need another month. Marketing campaigns get delayed. Customer pilots get postponed. Executive presentations need rewriting.

The team "missed commitment," so stakeholders lose confidence.

Next quarter, product managers add extra weeks to every timeline just to be safe. Engineering leaders give longer forecasts they know they can beat rather than their honest best estimate. Everyone protects themselves, the system slows down, trust erodes further.

Now, step back - why did the team commit to eight features in the first place? Usually because velocity suggested they could complete them.

The velocity number reflected what they'd delivered in the past. What it didn't reflect was whether those sprints had taught them anything, whether dependencies were worsening, whether technical debt was compounding, or whether the work ahead resembled the work behind.

Why velocity numbers mislead

Velocity treats delivery capacity as stable when it's dynamic.

Teams get faster as they remove friction and slower as complexity increases. Last sprint's number is already outdated, yet sprint planning sessions treat it as a reliable forecast.

Consider what velocity cannot tell you:

• Whether the team learned from previous mistakes
• Whether technical debt is slowing new work
• Whether dependencies have become more complex
• Whether the upcoming work requires unfamiliar technology
• Whether key team members will be available

Better agile estimation techniques won't fix coordination problems. But teams can fix coordination problems if they treat coordination itself as work that deserves attention.

Why fixing coordination problems matters for estimation

Teams that have messy estimation sessions usually know exactly what's wrong.

Someone will say it in standup: "We should really refine stories before planning."

Another person mentions it in Slack: "We need to check dependencies earlier."

It even comes up in the retrospective: "Our estimates are all over the place because we don't understand the work."

The insights are there. What's missing is follow-through.

Look at your last three retrospectives. How many action items got completed before the next one?

The average completion rate for retro action items sits around 0.33% - teams basically complete almost none of them. And that's mainly because the improvement actions exist outside the system that schedules work.

During retrospectives, teams identify real problems:

• "Our estimation sessions run too long because we don't refine stories beforehand"
• "We keep getting surprised by infrastructure work that's not in our backlog"
• "We never follow up on the spikes we create"
• "Dependencies block us mid-sprint because we didn't check capacity with other teams"

All true. All important. Then the retrospective ends, everyone returns to their sprint board, and those insights have nowhere to go.

The backlog contains features. The sprint contains stories. And improvement work lives in meeting notes, if anywhere. So it doesn't compete for capacity, doesn't get assigned an owner, doesn't get tracked, and doesn't get done.

How to make improvement work visible

Usage data from Easy Agile TeamRhythm showed teams completing only 40-50% of their retrospective action items. After releasing features to surface and track incomplete actions, completion rates jumped to 65%.

The mechanism was simple:

1. Convert retrospective insights into Jira work items
2. Give each one an owner
3. Slot them into upcoming sprints like any other work
4. Make incomplete action items from the previous retros more visible

When teams actually complete their retrospective actions, estimation gets better without changing the estimation technique. Stories get refined before planning, so there's less guesswork. Dependencies get checked earlier, so there are fewer surprises. The team builds shared understanding over time, so the spreads in planning poker get narrower and the discussions get shorter.

As you can see, this is a ripple effect.

Coordination problems compound when ignored, but they also improve when treated as real work.

A team that never fixes its planning problems will have messy estimation sessions next quarter, and the quarter after that. A team that deliberately improves coordination will gradually need less time to reach better software team alignment and their estimates will become more reliable as a byproduct.

What this means for tools and practice

Most planning tools were built to manage tasks, not support the conversations that help teams coordinate around those tasks. The challenge now is making coordination visible and trackable in the same place where delivery work happens.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm keeps coordination work alongside delivery work.

✅ User Story Map shows how work connects to goals, making sequencing a shared discussion instead of someone's private spreadsheet.

✅ Planning poker happens inside the Jira issue, where everyone sees the same acceptance criteria and attachments - so the spread of estimates becomes a trigger for conversation, not a number to agree on.

✅ Retrospective actions convert directly into backlog items that get added into upcoming sprints, so improvement work gets the attention it deserves.

The stakes for getting this right are rising. Atlassian's push towards AI assistance means your planning documents will be read by more people and processed by more systems. When Rovo searches your Jira instance, it surfaces whatever you've written - clear goals and explicit dependencies, or vague titles and hidden assumptions.

A fuzzy sprint goal doesn't just confuse your team. It confuses the dozen people across three time zones reading your board asynchronously, the automation trying to identify relevant work, the AI assistant trying to generate status updates, and the stakeholders trying to understand progress.

Where this leads

The teams that succeed over the next few years won't be the ones with the most sophisticated agile estimation techniques or the highest velocity scores.

They'll be teams where planning poker uncovers risks instead of producing commitments. Where retrospectives generate work items instead of wishful thinking. Where coordination shows up in Jira instead of getting discussed in conversations that disappear.

They'll be teams that figured out estimation was never about the numbers. It was always about getting everyone pointed in the same direction, with their eyes open, before the work starts.

The number is just what gets written down. The conversation that takes the team to the number is where the real work lies.

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 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.

Across hundreds of teams, we saw the same pattern: retrospectives were happening regularly, thoughtfully - and yet, less than half the retrospective action items ever got completed. Teams kept identifying valuable improvements, but those improvements stalled in execution. Instead of driving change, the same issues resurfaced sprint after sprint.

When we spoke with customers, they weren’t unclear on what to improve - they were actually stuck on how to follow through. The lack of visibility, accountability, and prioritization made progress feel out of reach.

That frustration led us to rethink how we approach retrospectives. Not just in the room, but in the days and weeks that follow. Because while most teams know how to reflect, far fewer know how to move forward.

Want to dive straight into action? Grab our free Retrospective Action Template here - a clear, practical guide to help your team stop spinning in circles and start making progress that actually sticks.

Or if you're keen to understand the deeper why behind this challenge, keep reading.

The invisible graveyard of good ideas

Think back to your last few retros. You likely surfaced blockers, celebrated wins, maybe even explored a tough team dynamic. The discussion probably felt honest - valuable, even.

Now ask yourself: What actually changed as a result?

Too often, retrospective action items, even the well-intentioned ones, are lost to the shuffle of a new sprint. The Jira board fills up, the deadline looms, and those carefully considered ideas fade into the background.

It’s not that teams don’t care. It’s that we often lack a system for taking action from team retrospectives in a way that’s trackable and integrated with our actual work.

We’ve seen the pattern: teams revisit the same problems retro after retro. Over time, that repetition chips away at trust. "Didn’t we already talk about this?" becomes the refrain, and eventually, the retro starts to feel like a ritual with no reward.

The follow-through problem

Most retrospectives don’t fail during the session itself; they falter in the days and weeks afterward. According to a poll in PMI's community, nearly two-thirds of respondents implemented fewer than 25% of the ideas from their retros - none reported implementing more than 75%.

"If your team consistently creates action items during Retrospectives but rarely completes them, you’re not alone. Unfinished action items are a major productivity killer and lead to stalled progress. The key to real improvement isn’t in creating long lists—it’s in following through. By treating Retrospective action items with the same importance as other Sprint tasks, your team can finally break the cycle of unfinished improvements and see real, beneficial change, individually and at the team level." - Stefan Wolpers, Age of Product

Follow-throughs often break down because of:

• Lack of clear ownership‍

When an action item belongs to 'everyone', it ends up belonging to no one. Teams that don’t assign a specific owner are less likely to see the item through. Accountability is a critical lever for ensuring follow-through and it’s often overlooked, especially in team-wide retros.

• No deadlines:

Action items without a timebox drift into the background. Teams frequently delay or deprioritize tasks that aren’t linked to specific sprint milestones or review points. Time-bound goals make follow-up tangible and measurable.

• Vague outcomes:

Teams often fall into the trap of writing retrospective items as intentions rather than actions. Broad phrases like “improve communication” or “fix our process” lack specificity. Without a clear 'what' and 'how', nothing moves.

• Too many actions:

When every idea from the retro becomes an action item, focus disappears. Prioritization is vital. Teams need to pick one or two meaningful improvements that are realistic for the sprint ahead. Otherwise, everything feels equally important—and nothing gets done.

• Poor visibility:

Action items are often scattered - living in whiteboards, static docs, or someone's memory. If teams can’t see what they committed to, they won’t act on it. Integrating follow-up tasks into the team’s daily tooling (like Easy Agile TeamRhythm in Jira) makes accountability unavoidable.

All of these factors add up to the same end result: a wide gap between good intentions and real progress. In our own usage data of Easy Agile TeamRhythm, teams were completing only 40–50% of their retrospective action items. After releasing features to surface and track incomplete actions, that completion rate jumped to 65%. Better follow-throughs, not just better conversations, are needed to drive real progress.

Common retrospective anti-patterns and their solutions

nti-patterns are common but counterproductive approaches to recurring problems that initially appear helpful but ultimately lead to negative outcomes. Unlike simple mistakes, anti-patterns are deceptive - they feel like the right thing to do in the moment but create deeper issues over time.

Teams consistently struggle with follow-through due to a combination of anti-patterns that weaken accountability and momentum. Here are the most common retrospective anti-patterns we see and how to address them:

1. The groundhog day pattern

Anti-pattern: The retrospective never changes in format, venue, or length, leading to the same issues being discussed repeatedly without resolution.

Why it happens: Teams fall into comfortable routines that feel "safe" but become stale and ineffective over time.

Solution: Vary your retrospective format regularly. Use different techniques like Start-Stop-Continue, 5 Whys, or Timeline Retrospectives. Change venues when possible - even moving from a conference room to an open space can shift energy and perspective.

2. The UNSMART action trap

Anti-pattern: Teams create action items that are vague, unmeasurable, or unrealistic (e.g., "improve communication" or "be more agile").

Why it happens: In the moment, broad aspirations feel meaningful, but they lack the specificity needed for execution.

Solution: Apply the SMART criteria to every action item: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-boxed. Instead of "improve communication," try "implement daily 15-minute team check-ins for the next two weeks."

3. The blame game

Anti-pattern: Retrospectives become cycles of finger-pointing and complaints without constructive problem-solving.

Why it happens: Teams lack psychological safety or facilitation skills to move from problems to solutions.

Solution: Establish "Vegas rules" (what's said in the room stays in the room) and focus on systems rather than individuals. Use techniques like "How might we..." questions to shift from blame to solution-oriented thinking.

4. The accountability vacuum

Anti-pattern: Action items are assigned to "everyone" or "the team," meaning no one feels personally responsible.

Why it happens: Teams want to avoid singling people out or assume collective ownership will naturally emerge.

Solution: Assign every action item to a specific person, even if execution involves the whole team. That person becomes the "champion" responsible for driving progress and reporting back.

5. The external focus trap

Anti-pattern: Teams spend most of their retrospective time discussing issues completely outside their control (other departments, management decisions, external dependencies).

Why it happens: External frustrations are often more emotionally charged and easier to discuss than internal team dynamics.

Solution: Use the "Circle of Influence" technique. Acknowledge external constraints briefly, then redirect focus to what the team can directly control and improve.

6. The documentation desert

Anti-pattern: No one takes notes or tracks what was discussed, leading to forgotten insights and repeated conversations.

Why it happens: Teams underestimate the value of retrospective outcomes or assume everyone will remember key points.

Solution: Designate a rotating note-taker and create a simple tracking system for action items. Include photos of boards or flip charts to capture visual elements.

7. The participation paradox

Anti-pattern: Some team members dominate discussions while others remain silent or disengaged.

Why it happens: Personality differences, power dynamics, or lack of structured facilitation create unequal speaking opportunities.

Solution: Use structured techniques like silent brainstorming, dot voting, or time-boxed speaking turns. Actively invite quieter members to share and ensure psychological safety for all voices.

A 5-step system for retros that lead to progress

Here’s the rhythm we’ve seen work across resilient, high-performing teams:

1. Prepare with purpose
   • Revisit action items from the previous retro - not just to tick them off, but to understand what’s changed since they were raised.
   • What moved forward? What didn’t? Why?
   • Clear out what’s stale. Highlight what’s still relevant. Identify patterns that deserve deeper discussion.
2. Focus the dialogue
   • Get beyond symptoms. Dig into root causes.
   • Use tools like “5 Whys” to sharpen your thinking.
   • Anchor the discussion on: What’s urgent and worth solving now?
3. Prioritize with intention
   • Don’t try to fix everything. Use an Impact/Effort Matrix to filter.
   • Choose 1–2 action items to commit to.
   • Assign owners. Define success. Agree on timelines.
4. Track where you work
   • Use a retrospective action tracker that lives inside your workflow.
   • In Easy Agile TeamRhythm, you can surface incomplete items, view their history, sort by relevance, and understand their context - all without switching tools.
5. Close the loop - every time
   • Review previous action items at the start of each retro.
   • Celebrate what’s done, even if it's small.
   • Reassess what to keep, modify, or drop.
6. Measure progress
   Start tracking your continuous improvement progress with simple, actionable metrics:Measuring these over time tells you whether you're improving how you improve.
   
   • ‍Action Item Completion Rate – % of action items completed before the next retro (target: 80–100%)‍
   • Recurring Issues Rate – How often the same topic resurfaces across retros‍
   • Average Age of Open Action Items – How long improvement tasks stay unresolved
   • ‍Retro Participation Rate – % of team actively contributing to retro inputs or votes

Stop repeating the same conversations

A team retrospective that works isn’t one that just uncovers issues - it’s one that resolves them. Building a habit of follow-through transforms retros from a passive meeting into a lever for real change.

If your retros feel like déjà vu, the problem might not be how you talk. It might be what happens after.

🎁 Get the full framework

We’ve distilled all these lessons and more into a practical, field-tested Retrospective Action Template. Inside, you’ll find:

• A step-by-step worksheet
• Guidance for assigning and tracking scrum action items
• Examples of achievable retrospective action items
• Built-in strategies for how to make a retrospective meaningful

👉 Download the free template here.

You’re already talking about what matters. Let’s make sure you act on it.

‍

At Easy Agile, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our products, and one of the ways we foster innovation is through Dash Days—a focused period where our team steps away from daily tasks to experiment, explore, and reimagine how our tools can better serve customers.

During our most recent Dash Days, we took a fresh look at the user interface of two of our flagship products, Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs. The goal was to enhance interaction and discoverability, so users can experience the full value of our tools without unnecessary complexity.

Here’s a glimpse into our thought process, challenges, and the exciting solutions we explored.

The challenge

As Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs have evolved, we’ve introduced powerful features designed to give users more control and flexibility. However, as new capabilities have been added, the interface has become more elaborate. For us, this presents an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back, simplify the experience, and help users unlock more of what our products offer.

To address this, we brought people from across the business together to brainstorm how we could improve the experience in both products. Through these sessions, we identified a few core opportunities:

• Discoverability: How do we make it easier for users to find and use the powerful features built into our tools?
• Visibility: What’s the best way to surface the right information and features when users need them? 
• Consistency: How do we create a more uniform experience within and across our products to make navigation intuitive?

Armed with these insights, we then set out to explore solutions tailored to each product’s unique challenges. 

A more personalized experience with Easy Agile Programs

For Programs, we focused on three “how might we” questions to reframe our challenges into opportunities: 

1. How might we create more focus on the actions users are trying to complete?
2. How might we make navigation more intuitive and easy?
3. How might we help users with more context about where they are in the app at any given screen? 

Out of the many solutions we explored, the one that got us the most excited was the idea of an Easy Agile Programs Home Screen—a personalized dashboard designed to guide users based on where they are in their planning cycle. 

This home screen could adapt based on where users are in their journey, offering relevant guidance and actions.

• For new users, the home screen could provide clear onboarding steps and easy access to help, so they can get started quickly and confidently.
• For experienced users, it could offer insights and key actions related to their progress, so they can stay focused on what matters most. Users might even see data summarizing their accomplishments, which makes it easier to share successes with their teams.

Whether someone’s brand new to the product or deep into execution, the home screen could be a great way to guide and coach our users—helping them answer questions like, "What should I be doing next?" or "What extra value am I missing out on?". 

A more focused interface for Easy Agile TeamRhythm

For TeamRhythym, our three key “how might we” questions were:

• How might we provide more focus within the User Story Map during sprint planning?
• How might we improve the discoverability of issues without epics?
• How might we enhance the layout to highlight key features and improve overall usability? 

With these questions in mind, we explored a range of ideas to simplify sprint planning and make it easier for users to prep, plan, and review their work, whether they’re using Scrum or Kanban.

Sprint planning can sometimes feel overwhelming when you have multiple sprints competing for attention. To help users focus, so we explored the idea of introducing a focused view during sprint planning. 

• This would allow users to zoom in on a specific sprint and the backlog alone, while collapsing others. 
• Each issue would have its own row in the detailed view, and users can drag and drop either an entire row or drag individual issues to quickly rank them based on priorities.
• The sprint view will also hide epics that don’t have linked issues in the current sprint, giving users a cleaner view of what’s relevant to their current work.

We also looked at ways to enhance the User Story Map interface to bring the most useful tools and features to the forefront. By improving how key functionality is presented, we’re helping teams quickly access what they need, when they need it, enabling them to stay productive without interruption.

This way, we can create a smoother, more focused experience for teams using TeamRhythm, so they can focus on what’s in front of them without being distracted by everything else.

Your turn. What do you think?

At Easy Agile, we’re always thinking about what comes next. 

These ideas aren’t on our official roadmap just yet, but they’re the kind of innovations we’re excited to explore.

If you think these changes would improve your experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs, let us know! Your feedback helps us decide what to prioritize, so we can continue building tools that truly make a difference for your teams.

‍

The seventh principle of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is:
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Not story points, not velocity, not estimates: working software.

Jason Godesky, Better Programming

Estimation is a common challenge for agile software development teams. The anticipated size and complexity of a task is anything but objective; what is simple for one person may not be for another. Story points have become the go-to measure to estimate the effort involved in completing a task, and are often used to gauge performance. But is there real value in that, and what are the risks of relying too heavily on velocity as a guide?

Agile estimation

As humans, we are generally terrible at accurately measuring big things in units like time, distance, or in this case, complexity. However, we are great at making relative comparisons - we can tell if something is bigger, smaller, or the same size as something else. This is where story points come in. Story points are a way to estimate relative effort for a task. They are not objective and can fluctuate depending on the team's experience and shared reference points. However, the longer a team works together, the more effective they become at relative sizing.

The teams that I coach have all experienced challenges with user story estimation. The historical data tells us that once a story exceeds 5 story-points, the variability in delivery expands. Typically, the more the estimate exceeds 5 points, the more the delivery varies from the estimate.

Robin D Bailey, Agile Coach, GoSourcing

Scale of reference

While story points are useful as an abstraction for planning and estimating, they should not be over-analyzed. In a newly formed team, story points are likely to fluctuate significantly, but there can be more confidence in the reliability of estimations in a long-running team who have completed many releases together. Two different teams, however, will have different scales of reference.

At a company level, the main value I used to seek with story points was to understand any systemic problems. For example, back when Atlassian released to Server quarterly, the sprints before a release would blow out and fail to meet the usual level of story point completion. The root cause turned out to be a massive spike in critical bugs uncovered by quality blitz testing. By performing better testing earlier and more regularly we spread the load and also helped to de-risk the releases. It sounds simple looking back but it was new knowledge for our teams at the time that needed to be uncovered.

Mat Lawrence, COO, Easy Agile

Even with well-established teams, velocity can be affected by factors like heightened complexity with dependencies scheduled together, or even just the average number of story points per ticket. If a team has scheduled a lot of low-complexity tickets, their process might not handle the throughput required. Alternatively having fewer high-complexity tickets could drastically increase the effort required by other team members to review the work. Either situation could affect velocity, but both represent bottlenecks.

Any measured change in velocity could be due to a number of other factors, like capacity shifting through changes in headcount with team members being absent due to illness or planned leave. The reality is that the environment is rarely sterile and controlled.

Relative velocity

Many organizations may feel tempted to report on story points, and velocity reports are readily available in Jira. Still, they should be viewed with caution if they’re being used in a ‘team of teams’ context such as across an Agile Release Train. The different scales of reference across teams can make story points meaningless; what one team considers to be a 8-point task may be a 3-point task for another.

To many managers, the existence of an estimate implies the existence of an “actual”, and means that you should compare estimates to actuals, and make sure that estimates and actuals match up. When they don’t, that means people should learn to estimate better.

So if the existence of an estimate causes management to take their eye off the ball of value and instead focus on improving estimates, it takes attention from the central purpose, which is to deliver real value quickly.

‍Ron Jefferies
Co-Author of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Story Points Revisited

Seeking value

However, story points are still a valuable tool when used appropriately. Reporting story points to the team using them and providing insights into their unique trends could help them gain more self-awareness and avoid common pitfalls. Teams who are seeking to improve how they’re working may wish to monitor their velocity over time as they implement new strategies.

Certainly, teams working together over an extended period will come to a shared understanding of what a 3 story point task feels like to them. And there is value in the discussion and exploration that is needed to get to that point of shared understanding. The case for 8 story points as opposed to 3 may reveal a complexity that had not been considered, or it may reveal a new perspective that helps the work be broken down more effectively. It could also question whether the work is worth pursuing at all, and highlight that a new approach is needed.

The value of story points for me (as a Developer and a Founder) is the conversations where the issue is discussed by people with diverse perspectives. Velocity is only relatively accurate in long-run teams with high retention.

Dave Elkan, Co-CEO, Easy Agile

At a company level, story points can be used to understand systemic problems by monitoring trends over time. While this reporting might not provide an objective measure, it can provide insights into progress across an Agile Release Train. However, using story point completion as a measure of individual or team performance should be viewed with considerable caution.

Story points are a useful estimation tool for comparing relative effort, but they depend on shared points of reference, and different teams will have different scales. Even established teams may notice velocity changes over time. For this reason, and while velocity reporting can provide insights into the team's progress, it must be remembered that story points were designed for an estimation of effort, rather than a measure. And at the end of the day, we’re in the business of producing great software, not great estimates.

Looking to focus your team on improvement? Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps you turn insights into action with team retrospectives linked to your agile board in Jira, to improve your ways of working and make your next release better than the last. Turn an action item into a Jira issue in just a few clicks, then schedule the work on the user story map to ensure your ideas aren’t lost at the end of the retrospective.

Many thanks to Satvik Sharma, John Folder, Mat Lawrence, Dave Elkan, Henri Seymour, and Robin D Bailey for contributing their expertise and experience to this article.

Story points can be a little confusing and are often misunderstood. Story points are an important part of user story mapping, and many agile teams use them when planning their work. But they aren't as simple as adding numbers to tasks or estimating how long a job will take.

Even if you’ve been using story points for a while, you’ll find that different teams and organizations will use them differently.  

So, let’s define story points, discuss why they’re so useful for agile teams, and talk about some of the different ways teams implement them in story mapping and sprint planning.

What are user story points?

Story points are a useful unit of measurement in agile, and an important part of the user story mapping process. You assign a number to each user story to estimate the total effort required to bring a feature or function to life.

When to estimate story points

User stories can be estimated during user story mapping, backlog refinement, or during sprint planning.

Once a user story has been defined, mapped to the backbone, and prioritized, it's time to estimate the story points. It is a good idea to work with your team to do this, as each team member plays a different role in different stories, and knows the work involved in UX, design, development, testing, and launching. Collaborating on story point estimation will also help you spot dependencies early.

It is best to assign story points to each user story before you sequence them into releases or sprints. This allows you to assess the complexity, effort, and uncertainty of each user story in comparison to others on their backlog, and to make informed decisions about the work you decide to commit to each sprint or release.

How to estimate user story points

When estimating story points, you're looking at the total effort involved in making that feature or functionality live so that it can deliver value to the customer. Your team will need to discuss questions like:

• How complex is the work?
• How much work is needed?
• What are the technical abilities of the team?
• What are the risks?
• What parts are we unsure about?
• What do we need in place before we can start or finish?
• What could go wrong?

Tip: If you're having trouble estimating a story or the scope of work is overwhelming, you might need to break your story down into smaller parts to make multiple user stories.

What is a story point worth?

This is where story points can get a little confusing, as story points don’t have a set universal value. You kind of have to figure out what they’re worth to you and your team (yep, real deep and meaningful stuff).

Here’s how it works:

• Each story is assigned a certain number of story points
• Points will mean different things to different teams or organizations
• 1 story point for your team might not equal the same amount of effort involved in 1 story point for another team
• The amount of effort involved in 1 story point should remain stable for your team each sprint and it should remain stable from one story to another
• 2 story points should equal double the effort compared to 1 story point
• 3 story points should equal triple the effort compared to 1 story point… and so on

The number you assign doesn't matter - what matters is the ratio. The story points should help you demonstrate relative effort between each story and each sprint.

Estimating story points for the first time

Because story points are relative, you need to give yourself some baseline estimates for the first time you do story point estimation. This will give you a frame of reference for all future stories.

Start by choosing stories of several different sizes:

• One very small story
• One medium sized story
• One big story

...a bit like t-shirt sizes.

Then assign points to each of these baseline stories. Your smallest story might be 1. If your medium story requires 3 times more effort, then it should be 3. If your big story requires 10 times the effort, it should be 10. These numbers will depend on the type of stories your team normally works on, so your baseline story numbers might look different to these.

The important thing is that you’ll be able to use these baseline stories to estimate all your future stories by comparing the relative amount of effort involved.

Over time, you and your team will find estimating user stories becomes easier as your shared understanding of the work develops. This is where story points become most valuable, helping your team align expectations and plan more effectively.

Make estimation easier

An app for Jira like Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes it easy to see team commitment for each sprint or version, with estimate totals on each swimlane.

Using the Fibonacci sequence for story point estimation

Some teams use the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, etc.) for their story point estimates, rather than staying linear or allowing teams to use any number (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.).

This has its benefits. For example, if you're looking at a story and trying to estimate whether it's a 5, 8, or 13, it's much quicker and easier to come up with an answer than trying to land on the right number between, say, 4-15. You'll likely reach a consensus much more quickly.

This also means you won't be able to average the team's story points to finalize the estimation. Instead, you'll need to discuss the work and decide on the best estimate from a limited set of options.

But it does limit your options - if you have a story that’s more effort than 34, but less than 55, your estimate might be less accurate.

Using story points to estimate velocity

After some time working together most teams will have a good idea about how much effort is involved in each story point.

Of course, timing isn't exact - there's a bell curve, and story points are designed to be an estimate of effort, not time.

But story points (and knowing their approximate timing) can be useful when it comes to figuring out how much your team can get done each sprint.

You should be able to estimate about as many story points your team can manage during a two-week sprint, or whatever timeframe you’re working to.

For example, if your team can usually get through 3 story points per day, this might add up to 30 story points across a two-week sprint. This is your velocity.

Velocity is useful for user story mapping and sprint planning. When mapping your user stories to sprints or versions, you can check the total story points and make sure it matches up with your velocity so you’re not over- or under-committed.

As you can see there are a few different methods for estimating work. The best advice is to be conservative and not overload the team.

Over time, your estimations should become more accurate.

Using Story Points in Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming

Story points are central to estimation and planning processes in many agile methodologies. Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) rely heavily on story points to gauge the effort and complexity of user stories.

Scrum teams use story points during sprint planning to decide which tasks to include in the upcoming sprint, encouraging discussion that leads to shared context and understanding of the work.

Extreme Programming on the other hand, uses story points to assess the size of features, enabling teams to prioritize and allocate resources effectively. Teams using Kanban can benefit from story points by using them to set work-in-progress limits and optimize the flow of tasks across the board.

While the specific practices may differ, story points can help encourage team collaboration and a more predictable flow of work.

The sprint goal is a key aspect of any sprint, and it should be front and center throughout your two-week process. The goal ensures the team is aligned on a clear purpose for the sprint, and, if done well, the goal inspires the team to stay on track throughout the entirety of the sprint.

So, what makes a good sprint goal, and how does the sprint goal fit within the framework of a sprint? In this post, we’re going to race (or should we say sprint 😉 ) through a recap of the Scrum process, followed by a list of five critical elements of an effective sprint goal. You’ll learn how to best create, manage, and follow through on your sprint goals for a successful sprint every two weeks.

An overview of the Scrum process

We’re big fans of Scrum! Need a little refresher? Here’s how the Scrum process works and where the sprint goal fits into the whole picture.

Scrum is an agile framework used primarily by software development teams that provides team members with a streamlined workflow to meet stakeholder and customer needs. The Scrum workflow has four meetings (also known as ceremonies), which all have a distinct purpose. This structure means team members can easily support each other by sharing, tracking, and enhancing deliverables.

The Scrum framework divides work into repeating two-week sprints where a set amount of work — the sprint goal — is completed. Each Scrum begins with a sprint planning meeting, and during this time, the product owner defines the sprint goal. They choose which tasks will move from the product backlog to the sprint backlog to be completed over the following two-week sprint.

Product backlog items represent the whole picture of what needs to be accomplished before completing or releasing a product. Sprint backlog items are what the team will (hopefully) accomplish over the course of the sprint.

The Scrum Master acts as a Scrum guide who leads the team through the meetings and steps of the Scrum process. Throughout the sprint, the Scrum team meets for a daily Scrum to check in with one another and report on what work was completed over the previous 24 hours.

At the end of the sprint, a sprint review and sprint retrospective help the team gather feedback from stakeholders and improve upon their processes before the next sprint begins. The entire process repeats again with sprint planning and continues to repeat until the product or project is complete.

Easy Sprint Planning:

Drag items directly from your backlog onto your TeamRhythm User Story Map. Inline edit story summaries and story point estimates. Display your sprint goal on each sprint swimlane.

TRY: TEAMRHYTHM SANDBOX DEMO

What makes a good sprint goal?

The sprint goal keeps the team focused and aligned on what everyone is trying to accomplish for each sprint. It’s an extension of the overall product or project goals, but the sprint goal can zero in on key components the team wants to tackle for that specific sprint.

What makes a good sprint goal? Let’s find out.

1. The goal is achievable

The objective of the sprint needs to be achievable within the sprint’s allotted time frame. Generally, in a Scrum framework, the team is time-bound to two weeks.

As new information is gained and other impediments occur, there’s always a chance the sprint goal won’t be met. But that shouldn’t stop you from setting achievable goals. When a team continually fails to meet the goals of the sprint and the project, morale and enthusiasm will decline.

It’s crucial that sprint goals are manageable within the allotted time of the sprint. Sprint goals can become too large when a team tries to accomplish too many different components at once or if too much of the product backlog makes it into the sprint backlog. Rather, take a reasonably achievable workload out of the product backlog to form the sprint backlog. Otherwise, you’ll end up with one daunting overall list and no clear direction for each sprint.

2. The team understands the definition of done

The clearer the sprint goal, the better. You need to clearly define the goals of the sprint and what it means to be done. How will the team know if they achieved the desired outcomes? What does “done” look like? Does everyone agree on this definition for every given task and the overall goals of the sprint?

Your goals need to be measurable to limit ambiguity, subjectivity, or conflicting opinions around the success of the sprint.

When a team is aligned, and everyone understands what needs to be accomplished, decision-making improves, and each aspect of the Scrum team can work harmoniously toward the same aims.

3. The sprint goal is meaningful to the team

Beyond knowing what the team hopes to accomplish over the course of each sprint, the team needs to understand the reasoning behind the sprint goal.

Make sure everyone understands why they are working towards a specific sprint goal. What meaning does the sprint goal have? Ideally, the meaning of the sprint goal will relate back to stakeholder needs, the customer journey, or the user experience of your product.

Visualize and prioritize the work that will deliver the most value to your customers

Easy Agile TeamRhythm

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4. The sprint goal aligns with the overall product goals

The sprint goal can zero in on a specific aspect of product development, but it should still connect to the overall product goals.

While creating sprint goals, ensure the overarching product vision isn’t lost or ignored. Every sprint, while specific to its own set of goals, should work toward accomplishing your product goals.

5. The sprint goal is visible throughout the sprint

The sprint goal can’t be a “set it and forget it” aspect of your sprint. It should be visible to the team the entire time, and the team needs to continually check in on the goal to ensure they’re on track to achieve it.

The shared goal should be front and center of daily Scrum meetings. If possible, display the sprint goal for everyone to see. As you accomplish backlog items and work through the sprint, continually reference the sprint goal and the progress you are making toward it. How likely are you to achieve the sprint goal considering the time you have remaining in the sprint? What might be standing in the way of achieving this goal?

During the sprint retrospective, you should discuss the success or lack of success the team made on the sprint goal. What went well and contributed to your success? What didn’t go so well that you could change or do differently for the next sprint?

With Easy Agile TeamRhythm, each scrum board in Jira will have an associated User Story Map.

Throughout the sprint, the team can refer to the User Story Map to make sure they’re on schedule, coordinate dependencies, and keep sight of the big picture.

TAKE A PRODUCT TOUR

A customer-centric approach

Let’s recap a few of the most important factors to remember when establishing and following through on your sprint goal:

✅ Ensure the goal is achievable.

✅ Ensure the team understands the definition of done.

✅ Ensure the sprint goal is meaningful for the team.

✅ Ensure the sprint goal aligns with the overall product goals.

✅ Ensure the sprint goal is visible throughout the sprint.

Thanks for sticking with us and utilizing the Easy Agile blog. We’re passionate about helping teams work better with agile. We have a suite of Jira apps designed to keep the customer top-of-mind through every step of the development process.

Looking for a tool to streamline your sprint planning sessions? Check out Easy Agile TeamRhythm, which transforms the flat product backlog into a meaningful picture of work.

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.

It’s time to get things done and hand over the project to the programmers. But before they get their hands dirty, someone must plan the Scrum sprint or iteration. The Sprint Planning meeting is one of Scrum’s ceremonies, and it's the sprint's opening event. 🎬

Let's walk you through the event and explain how to prepare and hold one successfully. You'll also learn who participates in Sprint Planning and why the meeting is so important.

What's a Sprint Planning meeting?

Sprint Planning is a Scrum meeting. It kicks off a sprint, so it occurs on the first day of a new sprint. If applicable, it should occur after the Sprint Review and the Sprint Retrospective from the previous iteration.

Sprint Planning aims to decide the deliverables for the upcoming sprint and define a plan to develop the work.

The entire Scrum Team (the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the Development Team) collaborates during Sprint Planning.

Can you imagine a successful project without planning? 🙅 We can't either, so we don’t start a Scrum sprint without planning it.

To plan a Scrum sprint, you need to decide:

• The sprint's duration — remember that a sprint is a timebox
• The sprint goal, which is its purpose and represents the product increment's value to the customer
• The work that the Development Team can complete during the sprint, what work items the team should do first to achieve the sprint goal, and how long they should take considering the team's capacity

Additionally, Sprint Planning should motivate the team and set realistic expectations.

By the end of the Sprint Planning meeting, the team must produce the following outcomes:

• A shared understanding of the sprint goal. This goal is the guideline for evaluating the Development Team's work once the sprint is over.
• The Sprint Backlog. This artifact represents the conversation between the Development Team and the Product Owner on the to-do work. It's the result of a balance between customer value and development effort.

Now, each Sprint Planning meeting requires some preparation. Read on about who should do it and what it entails.

How do you prepare for Sprint Planning?

The Product Owner should follow these steps to set the foundation for successful Sprint Planning:

• Combine the output of the previous Sprint Review, feedback from stakeholders such as management and customers, and the product vision
• Update and, if necessary, refine the product backlog
• Know the customer value that the development team needs to create in an increment

So, once all the preparation is over, it's time for the Sprint Planning meeting to take place.

How should the meeting go?

1. The Product Owner indicates the Product Backlog items — and corresponding priorities — that they consider the next sprint's best candidates. Items can be user stories, tasks, or bugs. The Product Owner proposes those items according to customer value and product vision.
2. Based on effort estimates and the Product Owner's proposal, the development team selects the product backlog items to work on during the current sprint. By promoting those items to sprint backlog items, developers agree on the sprint goal with the Product Owner.
3. Although optional, the team might discuss dependencies between items and who should work on each one of them.

Very few steps, right? However, some practical actions should add on to these steps. Discover what those actions are below.

How do you execute a successful Sprint Planning meeting?

1. Limit the meeting's duration. ⏳ Sprint Planning shouldn't take longer than 1-2 hours per sprint week. That means the meeting shouldn't take more than 2-4 hours for a two-week sprint.

2. Let the Scrum Master be the guardian of time. They're the ones responsible for ensuring that the meeting happens within the defined timebox.

3. Hold the meeting on the same day and at the same time every time. 📅 Team members can be quite busy and have full agendas. That's why reserving a slot in every participant's agenda is a good practice.

4. Define valuable, clear outcomes. 🎁 Those, together with a clear sprint backlog, increase the Development Team's motivation. Producing the right outcomes is pure satisfaction, and a clear work plan is the recipe to achieve that.

5. Make sure that the Scrum Master guarantees these things. First, that the conversation between the Development Team and the Product Owner is fruitful. They should all agree on the sprint goal. Second, that the developers make good choices when moving product backlog items to the sprint backlog. Selecting an item that is feasible for the sprint duration, team capacity, and workload is a good choice.

It might seem easy, but this is not all there is to do during Sprint Planning. There's a bunch of things to avoid.

If we were to give you some advice...

Make effort estimates against the development team's capacity. To decide on the amount of work that the team can accomplish in a sprint, consider the team's capacity. (And remember, estimates are just that — estimates.) Developers consider their previous experience, yet each sprint is unique and might change over its course. However, considering team capacity improves the accuracy of effort estimation. Additionally, story points might help the team with effort estimation.

Consider that the development team's ability to estimate should improve over time. Therefore, the team should not critique less accurate effort estimates after the sprint. Otherwise, the team will take much longer to estimate or provide much bigger estimates next time.

Don't try to plan every single thing during Sprint Planning. Leave the idea of coming up with the most complete, perfect Sprint Backlog ever at the front door. After all, Scrum is all about flexibility, and "Better done than perfect." So, a Sprint Backlog that’s complete enough to get developers started is just what it needs to be. Remember that solving complex problems requires a learn-by-doing approach, which turns planning into an equally complex job.

Figure out a realistic expectation for the sprint's outcome. Setting unrealistic expectations for the increment that the development team can produce over a sprint is not a good idea. It might make developers frustrated that they couldn't deliver, which can seriously affect their motivation and performance. On the other hand, realistic expectations set the team for success and a sense of accomplishment. Besides, they facilitate the conversation between the developers and the Product Owner so they can agree on the sprint goal.

Have a well-refined product backlog. It must be detailed enough to allow the Development Team to understand what the work items are about. You don't want to waste precious Sprint Planning time splitting work items into a maximum of one per day. Define and follow a backlog refinement process and ensure that Product Backlog items meet your definition of ready.

Propose a clear sprint goal. 🎯 The Product Owner must be very clear on the expected customer value for the increment. Otherwise, the development team might choose a set of product backlog items that don’t relate to one another. The result could be unexpected outcomes and a low sense of accomplishment.

Clarify the definition of done with the Development Team. Knowing what work done means in the current sprint helps the developers meet the expectations. That's because they can better understand what to do to create the increment. Also, a clear definition of done makes the Development Team more confident when estimating effort.

Strong Sprint Planning makes your project stronger

If you're following the Scrum framework, Sprint Planning is not a choice. Nevertheless, if you ever feel tempted to skip it, bookmark this article and read the following. 📑

It's easier to understand the sprint goal, to-do work, and sprint outcomes with a successful Sprint Planning meeting. If the team doesn't know where it's heading and how to get there, it gets really tough to satisfy customer needs. It's equally hard to deliver your customers valuable increments if you don't organize work by priorities.

Sprint Planning is about instilling clarity and organizing work before it's too late in the iteration. It's also about involving the whole team in preparing for all the effort that a sprint demands. A note: Keep in mind that a sprint plan must fit into a sprint's timebox and consider the team capacity.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm is perfect for Sprint Planning. It's a fast, straightforward, visual, and collaborative tool that allows you to:

• Drag items directly from the product backlog onto the user story map
• Register effort estimates in user stories
• Edit story point estimates
• Prioritize user stories in each sprint by ordering them inside the respective sprint swimlane
• Analyze sprint statistics to ensure that the planned work doesn't exceed the team's capacity and the sprint goal is realistic
• Visualize what the team will deliver and when by arranging user stories into sprint swimlanes

Let us know if you have any questions about Easy Agile TeamRhythm. We highly recommend it to your Scrum project, and our customers recommend the same.

A sprint backlog is like an agile team's treasure map — checking off each item is like visiting a different place on the map. By the end of a sprint or iteration, the team will have delivered previously agreed outcomes and ultimately achieved their sprint goal. This is like getting to the ✖️ on a treasure map.

Join us as we find the answers you need to successfully complete each sprint. You'll learn about a sprint backlog’s purpose, plus who creates, owns, updates, and uses it.

What's a sprint backlog?

A sprint backlog consists of the items that need to be completed in order to get to the sprint goal. It should go into artifact during the sprint planning meeting. A sprint backlog has three parts:

• The sprint. Each sprint backlog targets a specific iteration.
• The sprint goal. This is the higher level aim for each sprint. To achieve it, the development team completes certain items from the product backlog.
• A plan. The sprint backlog represents a plan to deliver a product increment by the end of the sprint. It's organized to allow for progress tracking with to-do, in-progress, and done items, plus effort estimations and remaining workload.

The sprint backlog should always be accessible and up-to-date so that the development team understands the work and can see what is coming up next. It should also have enough detail to allow tracking work progress.

Each sprint starts with a sprint backlog, and the artifact's lifespan equals the sprint's duration. You may expect to find work items — user stories, tasks, or bugs — in it.

The sprint backlog is the development team's go-to home to find all the ideas for what to work on. At every Daily Stand-Up,, the team looks at it to let others know what they did the day before. Additionally, they recall or adjust priorities based on what they need to do for the next day(s).

🧐 During the Daily Stand-Up, developers also use the sprint backlog to evaluate the sprint's progress.

The sprint backlog is not only a way of keeping the development team's eyes on the prize. 👀 It's also a way to discuss how well they achieved the sprint goal.

At any point in a sprint, to-do, in-progress, and done items are included in the sprint backlog for anyone to review and use to calculate the remaining workload. This helps verify if the development team is on track to achieve the sprint goal. ✌️

Jira provides a burndown chart to check the development team's work. This displays the remaining workload for the current sprint. In addition, the chart shows:

• Work in progress
• The distribution of work throughout the iteration

A Jira burndown chart also helps evaluate whether additional items fit into the sprint and effort estimations were accurate.

🛑 Keep in mind that you don't need a sprint backlog if you follow the Kanban framework. That’s because Kanban isn’t about working in timeboxes (the sprints).

Now, the sprint backlog isn't an off-the-shelf artifact that you can use in your project — every project is unique. So, someone must be responsible for populating the sprint backlog with work items.

Besides defining what a sprint backlog is, we should discuss what sets them apart from product backlogs.

Sprint backlogs vs. product backlogs

Though their names are similar, a sprint backlog and product backlog serve different purposes. A product backlog is:

• A collection of work items to either bring a new product to the market or improve an existing product
• A list of work items to tackle in the future
• A set of work items arranged by priority, with the most priority at the top
• The source of the sprint backlog items

On the other hand, a sprint backlog is:

• A subset of work items from the product backlog
• A group of items to work on during the next sprint

Here’s how the two backlogs meet: The product backlog provides work items for a sprint backlog. And, by the end of a sprint, the team might transfer incomplete work to the next sprint or the product backlog. If the work items have high priority, they should go into the next sprint. If not, they should go into the product backlog for a later sprint.

Essentially, a product backlog covers a greater amount of time than a sprint backlog. However, like the sprint backlog, the product backlog might evolve to reflect changes in the market or customer needs and, the development team needs both in order to deliver product changes.

Now, the sprint backlog isn't an off-the-shelf artifact that you can use in your project — every project is unique. So, someone must be responsible for populating the sprint backlog with work items.

Who owns and creates sprint backlogs?

Here are the team members involved in creating sprint backlogs:

• The Scrum Master. During the Sprint Planning ceremony, the Scrum Master uses the product backlog to create the sprint backlog — the output. However, the Scrum Master doesn't do it alone.
• The development team. When moving product backlog items to the sprint backlog, the Scrum Master considers the development team's input. ⚖️
• The Product Owner. The Scrum Master needs the Product Owner's agreement to include product backlog items in the sprint backlog. 👌 And if the development team has questions about the product backlog, the Product Owner is the one to ask.

The sprint backlog's creation is one part of the agile workflow that shows how essential teamwork is to agile. Nevertheless, the sprint backlog must always be owned by someone throughout the workflow. Otherwise, these artifacts can get lost and become outdated.

Scrum methodology says that the whole agile team owns the Sprint Backlog. And by "agile team," we mean the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the development team.

That’s because all agile team members contribute:

• The Product Owner knows what the development team should deliver by the end of the sprint. Plus, they order product backlog items by priority. In other words, the Product Owner constrains the product backlog items that should go into the next sprint backlog.
• The Scrum Master has enough experience to distribute the development team's work throughout the sprint. When considering sprint backlog item dependencies, that distribution makes the most sense.
• The development team knows how long similar Sprint Backlog items take to complete. ⏲️ This means they can determine the sprint goal's feasibility within a certain time frame.

Remember, the sprint backlog is a living document, so team members should update it as needed. Let’s look at how a sprint backlog can change.

Updating the sprint backlog

The sprint backlog should adapt to answer market trends and customer needs as they arise. Those changes might influence items in the product backlog and how they’re prioritized. As a result, the sprint backlog changes.

Let's have a look at what may cause a sprint backlog to change and who makes the updates:

1. Effort estimations were not accurate enough. If the development team realizes that some work items will take longer than expected, they should raise a 🚩. They should then negotiate the scope of the sprint backlog with the Product Owner without compromising the sprint goal.
2. A new, higher-priority user story, task, or bug comes up. If that happens, the development team should add it to the sprint backlog. That might impact the sprint's duration or push some items to the next sprint.
3. Progress in completing a user story or a task or solving a bug changes daily. As this happens, the development team should keep updating the remaining workload they estimated for the current sprint. And they should do it during the Daily Stand-Up or Daily Scrum meeting. Once the development team finishes all the work in the sprint backlog, they achieve the sprint goal. This means the development team implemented the product increment, which is ready for delivery. 📦
4. A sprint backlog item is no longer needed. This might be due to a shift in the market or customer needs. If that happens, the development team should remove the item from the artifact. 🗑️
5. The development team better understands sprint backlog requirements as the sprint continues. So, they might realize that to achieve the sprint goal, they need to include more items in the sprint backlog.

The sprint backlog: A guide for sprint success

A sprint backlog is a guide for completing a sprint goal. This means that its lifecycle is short and equals the iteration's duration. It's a visual representation of the sprint that supports Scrum team discussions on in-progress and to-do work.

This backlog may also be the most reassuring Scrum artifact for developers, as it assures them the work is organized and no additional work items will fall from the sky without their knowledge. If the workload must increase, the team will debate it and weigh the developers' experience-based opinion.

With a sprint backlog, the team perfects its ability to plan sprints, estimate effort, and allocate resources. They learn how long work takes and how much of it fits into a sprint. And by learning this, the team learns the resources they need to get to the finish line.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm is collaborative sprint planning tool that helps your team with the shared context that the story map format provides. TeamRhythm helps your team to:

• Visualize a meaningful picture of work on the user story map, sequenced into sprint swimlanes
• Create, estimate and prioritize user stories right on the story map
• See comitment at a glance with sprint statistics and sprint goals displayed on each swimlane

Try planning your sprints with Easy Agile TeamRhythm. We’re confident it will help your team collaborate even more seamlessly.

“Do or do not; there is no try.” While this is certainly Jedi Master Yoda’s most famous quote, it doesn’t exactly apply to agile development. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of agile. If Yoda were a Scrum Master, however, the quote would look a lot more like this: “Try and again try; that is how you do.”

The Scrum Master facilitates the Scrum team, leading them to a hopeful victory. It’s rewarding, but the Scrum Master role is filled with pressure. The success of the Scrum and the wellbeing of the team falls on the Scrum Master’s shoulders.

If you’re a Scrum Master or aspire to become one, you’ve come to the right place. Master Scrum theory and your leadership skills with our six strategies for Scrum Masters.

Understanding Scrum values and the role of the Scrum Master

Scrum is an agile practice commonly used for product development. It’s based on completing a set amount of work in short bursts — called sprints — so that teams can continuously create iterations as they learn more about a product and its stakeholders.

Ken Schwaber co-created the Scrum framework in the early 1990s to help teams manage complex development projects. He also founded Scrum Alliance and established Scrum.org, an online resource for agile teams.

At the beginning of a Scrum, the product owner decides which product backlog items will be moved to the sprint backlog. From there, the Scrum Master takes over, leading the team through Scrum events, including:

• Sprint planning
• Daily Scrum or daily standups
• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospectives

The role of the Scrum Master is to guide the team through the Scrum process. They facilitate the process, helping the team to master the framework and improve from one sprint to the next.

Characteristics that define a great Scrum Master

Being an effective Scrum Master goes beyond simply following the rules of Scrum. Here are some additional characteristics that truly define excellence in this role:

1. Emotional intelligence

A great Scrum Master possesses high emotional intelligence. This means they can:

• Understand and manage their own emotions.
• Empathize with the team members' feelings and perspectives.
• Facilitate constructive communication and resolve conflicts gracefully.

2. Strong facilitation skills

It's not just about managing the daily Scrum meetings. They need to:

• Encourage open dialogue.
• Ensure every voice is heard.
• Guide the team towards consensus without being overbearing.

3. Adaptability

The landscape of a project can change rapidly. Great Scrum Masters:

• Adapt to changes swiftly without losing focus.
• Help the team pivot strategies quickly while maintaining morale.

4. Lifelong learner

The world of Agile is always evolving. Exceptional Scrum Masters:

• Commit to continuous learning.
• Stay updated with the latest practices, tools, and methodologies.

5. Servant leadership

At the heart of a Scrum Master's role is servant leadership. This involves:

• Placing the team's needs above their own.
• Removing obstacles that hinder the team's progress.
• Empowering team members to take ownership and make decisions.

6. Analytical thinking

A great Scrum Master should be able to:

• Analyze the team's processes and identify bottlenecks.
• Use data-driven insights to foster continuous improvement.

7. Motivational skills

Keeping the team motivated is crucial for sustained productivity. They excel at:

• Recognizing and celebrating small wins.
• Encouraging a positive, collaborative team culture.

8. Excellent communication

Communication is key. They need to:

• Convey ideas clearly and concisely.
• Ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page.

By embodying these characteristics, a Scrum Master not only facilitates effective project management but also fosters a thriving team environment that encourages innovation and success.

Six strategies to become a great Scrum Master

Here are six strategies for Scrum Masters to improve their skills or prepare for their future roles.

1. Don’t forget to be agile yourself

Do you live by agile principles yourself? How agile are you in your leadership style?

Effective Scrum Masters know that they also need to continually improve based on new experiences, successes, and failures. It’s important to learn from your mistakes so that you don’t make them again, but it’s just as important to learn from your successes. Take the time to review your process, including what went well and what didn’t, so you know how you can improve as a leader and facilitator.

2. Get to know your team

Your ability to lead your team is tied to how well you know them. You should continually get to know your team’s strengths and weaknesses. How well do they work together? Who brings out the best in one another, and who doesn't work so well together? Dig deep to truly understand the root dynamics of the team.

Learn more about each individual on the team as well. What do they need help with? What do they excel at? What feedback can you provide to help them grow in their role? How can you help them succeed? Build rapport with your team members by asking how they’re doing, giving and receiving feedback, and finding common ground.

3. Foster a culture of continuous feedback

The agile methodology is based on continuous improvement. How will the individuals on your team improve if you don’t provide them feedback? Likewise, how will you improve if you don’t ask for, and accept, feedback from the team?

Feedback is a two-way street, and it only works if it’s constructive and continuous. Don’t wait until you have something negative to address — you need to regularly provide both positive and negative feedback. Doing this on a regular basis will help you and your team become accustomed to hearing feedback, so it won’t be jarring or off-putting when you do.

As the Scrum Master, you should foster an environment in which all members give and receive constructive feedback.

4. Hone your communication skills

Being in charge doesn’t mean you’re always doing the talking. The opposite is true: Great leaders are great communicators. As a leader, you need to constantly listen to your team, keeping both ears open for any issues your team or the individuals on it may be dealing with.

Actively listen to the concerns of the development team, and consider how each individual on your team prefers to communicate. Do they prefer bold and to-the-point interactions? Or do they need time to ease into a conversation? Everyone communicates a little differently, and understanding your team's preferences will help you make the most of each interaction.

Scrum Masters need to hone their communication skills in order to be effective leaders for their teams. Regularly assess your communication style and its effectiveness, and ask your team for feedback on how you are doing.

5. Make the most of every retrospective

The retrospective is the final event of a Scrum. They are an incredibly important part of the Scrum process, and they should not be overlooked, rushed, or underutilized. As the Scrum Master, you need to take responsibility for making sure retrospectives are effective and occur after each Scrum. Go in with a plan to make the most of every retro meeting.

That doesn’t mean you need to take charge of everything. It’s helpful to let your team run the occasional retrospective. Everyone involved should continually contribute their own ideas to improve the meeting.

Collect regular feedback from your team on how they think your retrospectives are going. Ask for ideas on how they could improve, and change things up. Repeating the exact same questions and retrospective activities will bore your team and lead to reduced engagement.

For more retrospective perspective, read our five steps to holding effective sprint retrospectives.

6. Become a certified Scrum Master

A Scrum Master certification can take you from simple Scrum Master to masterful Scrum Master. While certification isn’t required to become a professional Scrum Master, it certainly helps.

Scrum.org, the website founded by the co-creator of Scrum, offers a three-part certification program called The Professional Scrum MasterTM. The program has three assessment levels that validate your knowledge of the Scrum framework and practical application of Scrum theory.

• The Professional Scrum MasterTM I (PSM I)
• The Professional Scrum MasterTM II (PSM II)
• The Professional Scrum MasterTM III (PSM III)

We’re also big fans of Pretty Agile’s SAFe training programs:

• SAFe Scrum Master SSM Certification
• SAFe Advanced Scrum Master

A certification is a great addition to your resume, and it will help you fine-tune your facilitation skills and Scrum knowledge.

Easy Agile for Scrum Masters

“Try and again try; that is how you do.”

The beauty of agile is that regardless of how many certifications or years of experience you have, there’s always more to improve. Agile is an iterative process in which learning continues from sprint to sprint and project to project. As a Scrum Master, it’s up to you to continue learning the craft and perfecting your facilitation skills, the Scrum Master role involves life-long learning.

Easy Agile builds products designed to help Scrum Masters and agile developers work more efficiently and effectively. Our tools are specifically designed for teams that use and love Jira but need more functionality in order to prioritize customer needs.

Try Easy Agile TeamRhythm to support your team agility from planning through to review. TeamRhythm supports user story mapping, backlog refinement, sprint and version planning, and team retrospectives, building a continuous cycle of improvement right in Jira. It’s a win-win-win for Scrum Masters, development teams, and customers. Try our products absolutely free for 30 days.

Let's face it! Project management for agile teams can include a lot of tough calls, from managing product owner expectations or undefined quality standards.

Sure, you have good days and bad days. But why not set your sights higher and aim for the ideal day?

To help you do just that, planning poker, also called Scrum poker, uses playing cards to simplify agile estimating and planning. The result? Your agile estimating and planning process runs more smoothly, and your development team increases its productivity.

In this article, you’ll explore the driving force behind planning poker,  how it helps estimation, planning poker’s history, and how to play this game.

The driving force behind planning poker

The purpose of planning poker is engaging the whole team in collaboration. Scrum poker makes it easier to make valuable time and effort estimates so your team can create satisfying deliverables.

Instead of team members verbally expressing their estimates, they use a deck of playing cards to speak for them. Drawing cards and simultaneously placing these playing cards face down eliminates bias. Everyone follows this route in the estimation process, which supports individual estimates and negates peer influence.

Other project estimation techniques use time to determine how long a task will take. Agile estimation uses story points. These story points refer to the level of effort to undertake a task.

In planning poker, the whole team assigns story points to each task. Each story point is a visual representation of the amount of work to be done and the effort that must go into completing each task. This method wins out over time since it is visual and focuses on effort involved instead of time constraints

Work estimation in agile development

The estimation process is vital to team members because it determines how much work will go into each sprint. Dividing the product backlog into bite-sized tasks helps evaluate the workload.

As a Scrum master, you have a difficult role to play. At the end of the ideal day, you want the product owner's user story to be exemplary. Simultaneously, as the Scrum master, you have a Scrum team to manage.

Agile development is a critical process that you need to control. Get the user story and story points right, and you're halfway there. Master the estimation process and sprint planning, and you control the product backlog and retrospective.

Software development teams can either use physical playing cards or software for planning poker. Using software that includes a Jira plugin is vital when you have distributed teams. When you have a Jira plugin, everyone can participate in and streamline the estimation process.

History of planning poker

Software development teams used to use another team-based estimation technique, Wideband Delphi. Although similar to planning poker, it took too much time to reach consensus with this technique.

James Grenning found that Delphi didn't work as a structured estimating approach and came up with the idea of playing poker in 2002. Grenning found that a physical deck of cards was an engaging approach for agile teams to make work estimates. He also found that Scrum poker worked better than Wideband Delphi.

Planning poker is more inclusive. The deck of cards ensures Scrum team participation in work estimates, and everyone must continue to participate until consensus is reached.

In 2002, Mike Cohn developed mountain goat software and stepped in with a deck of digital cards to use in planning poker. Scrum teams can use these digital playing cards from remote locations to improve agile estimating and planning and have some fun along the way.

Let's explore the ins and outs of the poker session and how to play the game.

What Scrum teams need for a poker session

Agile teams need a few essential items for their planning sessions. These items include:

• A deck of cards
• Estimators (the agile team)
• A moderator
• A features list
• An egg timer

Choose your playing cards

In Scrum poker, team members (estimators) each have a deck of cards. They use these playing cards to indicate their high or low estimate on how long each item on the list of features will take to complete. These list features can be the user story, story points, or ideal days to complete sprint planning.

The playing cards the development team use will follow a Fibonacci sequence. This Fibonacci sequence follows the 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 pattern, where each consecutive number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.

Alternatively, team members can use a different deck of cards where the value of each number has a fixed ratio, such as 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12 and so on.

Different card decks provide adapted sequences, such as 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, and 100. Other commercial decks have cards to indicate that the agile team needs a coffee break or an infinity symbol which means that it is impossible to complete a task.

Similarly, team members can adopt a standard deck of cards for Scrum poker. Here, the team members use the Ace, the 2, 3, 5, 8, and the King.

How to play Scrum poker

Every Scrum team will have different goals, but the general sequence for playing planning poker is as follows:

• All team members have their own deck of cards except for the moderator.
• Team members ask the moderator (often the product owner) questions about themes, user stories, story points, product backlogs, agile retrospectives, or whatever else they need for their agile estimating and planning process. Questions typically surround the product owner's acceptance criteria. Questions can include whether the backlog items are complete and what the next best step is to complete the sprint.
• Once the moderator answers the agile team's questions, each team member selects a card estimate. That represents how long they think the work item will take.
• Team members then place their cards, face down, on the table or use a Jira plugin for distributed teams.
• Playing cards are placed face down to prevent anchoring, or influencing each other's evaluations.
• The moderator reveals the Scrum team's cards to view their estimates.
• If team members have a high or low estimate compared to other team members, they need to explain their reasoning. The agile team can ask more questions for clarification. This questioning period is often limited by using an egg timer.
• The process is repeated until the agile team agrees on the estimate of how long it’ll take to complete each user story.
• Agreement is frequently reached on the second or third draw of the playing cards for each work item.

Agile estimation that involves the whole team

Planning poker is an accurate, collaborative, team-building method of estimating the work for each user story.

While you prepare to use planning poker in your next product roadmap planning meeting, consider Easy Agile TeamRhythm. The app helps you group Jira items into themes so stakeholders can easily keep track.