Product Goal & Sprint Goals – A Simple Example

Well done Simon! Great examples and slick presentation. Everybody should be getting the 'Goal(s)' message now.

Thank you Michael. My next post will be about why Product Goals and Sprint Goals are so important.

Hi, I'm not sure I got it all....Or maybe I simply have a different opinion... :)
What you call "Product Vision" seems to be instead a marketing strategy, a Program
As far as the "Product Goal"... For me the Product is one and it's something more tangible.
Your description of the different "Product Goal" maybe fits with the concept of "Epic" or, in the end, it can result in three different Agile Project of the unique Program "Be the leading online Bakery in the UK"...

Hi Barbara,

Scrum as a framework leaves a lot of different ways to use all of these concepts. For example:

My Product Vision could also be a marketing strategy.
The scope of a Product Goal can vary widely and be relatively small or large in scope.
There may be an overlap with Product Goals and Epics (if you use them).
And so on...

Thank you Simon! Maybe I'm too used to our way :) Have a good day in UK and greeting from Italy!

https://media1.giphy.com/me...

Tony Stark? U win! :)

Hi, I am member of a SM CoP and we are trying hard to understand and be able to use the concept of product goals. We tried to create a couple of product goals for an existing product but don't find them good. Now we are looking for good examples, that is how I got here. And I really appreciate your effort but unfortunately, I don't find your examples convenient, either. According the the new SG, "The Product Goal describes a future state of the product which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against.". Now your example: "Launch a website that allows sales to customers inside London." does not seem like a future state, but very much like a milestone or an order and hence I cannot see the value it would provide. Don't get me wrong, I just look for really good examples, which I can imagine to be inspirational for a team to commit, is different from a roadmap cell, and is not a milestone like thing. Are you absolutely sure, that your examples are the ones that can give the extra value we should expect from raising product goals? Thank you.

Thank you Simon for this interesting article! I think there is a small typo, under the heading" Product Goal", you wrote

"...current Product Goal is fulfilled on discarded."

I believe you meant to write "or" instead of "on".

Kind regards,
Olivier

Thank you for your effort to provide examples for Product and Sprint goals.
I am having a hard time (like @miklsguthy:disqus) to understand the additional value of these kind of goals, compared to a functional and work breakdown of what the future product globally consists of and what needs to be done to produce it.
This can be expressed and monitored by epics, features, stories and tasks. In some situations, a 'team' goal, rather than a 'product' or 'sprint' goal might serve the team. For example: "In 3 months, the list of open customer tickets must be reduced to 10%". Or "For the upcoming 4 sprints, the team will focus on the new feature X and not be distracted by non-critical support questions" or "Let's strictly follow the DoD for at least three sprints, to see if it still works for us". Such goals help to focus on items that cannot (easily) be grouped by epics, features, etc.
Even if there is a difference between the goal concept that you define here and the list of work items on a Scrum board and an up-to-date, prioritized product backlog, I think it will be a very small difference, with low added value. A team should question itself whether it is worth spending time and energy (discussions, meetings) on defining these type of goals (assuming the team does have epics, features, etc defined).

I am always very much into good Sprint Goals. I am sorry to say I don't agree with your examples. To me they looks like tasks instead of a goal.

A goal is for me something that is pretty SMART and abstract and should be easily associated with a purpose.

Something like: Increase the conversion rate by 10 % by providing more payment options.

How do you write sprint goals for technical stories (eg : Azure migration stories)

I'd love to see if you can update this article and accommodate product vision, product strategy into this article, even a paragraph if it is not needed or already covered by other ideas in this article.

Thank you for the examples. I do have a question though. As part of a company's business plan, there are normally high-level strategic goals, such as Mission Statement, Vision Statement, etc. I have read through many blogs on this topic, but I have yet to see how these tie into that. How do they tie in?

All of those and more could be in use. A Product Goal would be a step towards them.

I couldn't disagree more. Scrum - as defined by Ken Rubin has a very precise intention for each part that has a specific purpose. This list of goals looks more like the backlog should look. If your goals look like this, I wonder how the backlog looks? In Essential Scrum, it seems like the Sprint Goal is not well defined, but the inference in how it's discussed is that it's a single statement, not a bullet list of what could be either story description or even acceptance criteria.