Planning: Pre-Scrum / Pre-Product Backlog
Does anyone have a best practice for tracking/planning work or activities that occur prior to your first sprint? I'm trying to understand how to manage our team's time for activities that do not produce a client-facing output (POC, user research etc.).
Example: A company has a strategic roadmap vision to expand product offerings in the next quarter. Does scrum provide coverage for the activities that translate vision to the backlog?
That would be the activity known as Refinement. Remember that Scrum, and agile in general, is about incrementally doing the work. So instead of completely translating the vision into Product Backlog Items (PBIs), translate enough items to begin working and have the others evolve as work progresses.
As for tracking/planning these activities my opinion is that there isn't a lot of value in doing so. Scrum advocates tracking value that is delivered to stakeholders, not tracking every action that a person on a Scrum Team takes. However, if I were required by the organization to track these activities, I would start my first Sprint with nothing in the Product Backlog and the Sprint Backlog would be full of "Spikes" with a Sprint Goal of producing enough Product Backlog items for the Scrum Team to start building the first increment of potentially releaseable value. From there the act of refinement would continue to build out the Product Backlog.
Very helpful Daniel, that's the approach I took given it's more of an organizational requirement at the moment and I'm new to the product management role.
Does anyone have a best practice for tracking/planning work or activities that occur prior to your first sprint?
Make them as short as you can, because they rob you of time before establishing empirical process control, and use the first Sprint to validate as much of the work as possible.