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YES! It's still true that you need a Sprint Goal

May 7, 2021

Why are Sprint Goals so important?

Imagine you’re a football team and you’re out on the field and you have no idea why you’re there. So, you look around and you just start running and somebody throws a ball and every once in a while you hear some cheering from the fans and you go grab yourself a hot dog….. That would be kind of ridiculous, wouldn’t it? football teams have goals. They go out onto the field and they intend to win. The first thing that they have to do is get to the next first down. The next thing you have to do, well, you have to score. And then if you’ve scored enough times you might win the game and if you win the game and you win enough of those you might win the championship at the end of the season. Without a team having goals there’s no way for them to self-manage. All they’re going to do is divide and conquer run around like a bunch of idiots and at the end of the day well you get what you get.

Imagine your friend is trying to move from an apartment on the south side to an apartment on the southwest side and they call you up and a bunch of friends and say “hey, I’ll buy you guys beer and pizza just help me move”. We all show up and we look around and uh turns out all the work has been pre-assigned. I have all the heavy things, I have to move a piano and I have to move some bricks. Susie, well, she doesn’t have to move very much at all just a couple of pairs of shoes and a tennis ball and ralph… he has so much stuff to move I don’t know how he’s ever going to finish. So, I do my work I get my work done I move my piano, and then I’m sitting around eating beer and pizza ralph is struggling. I’m just watching. My job’s done…….That would be silly. The goal was to move my friend from the apartment on the south side to the southwest side it doesn’t matter how much work that I do or don’t do what matters is we as a team accomplish the goal.

You see with Sprint goals create an environment where people can self-manage people work together and people can help each other out to get the work done so that we can accomplish the goal. Without Sprint goals a Scrum team will flail. You’re going to see a lot of dividing and conquering but not a lot of results. So, have Sprint goals they’re one of the most important aspects of Scrum. As a matter of fact, do a search for Sprint goal in the 2020 version of the Scrum Guide and you’re going to see that it shows up 19 times that’s a lot of times it’s a serious issue you need a Sprint goal


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