YDS: Should a Scrum Team Have Multiple Sprint Goals?

Today's question is about how a Scrum Team should handle multiple sprint goals. Todd and Ryan break down their past experiences with teams who insist on having multiple sprint goals and the issues that come with this anti-pattern. The big lesson here: FOCUS! and get something done.

How does your Scrum Team handle sprint goals? Let us know in the comments!

This is one of those Scrum Master interview questions about the Scrum Events that can throw you off. Do you understand why a Scrum Team should only have one sprint goal? These Scrum Master day in the life questions can be tricky. The backlog refinement meeting is important. Perhaps some Scrum Master training could help? Want to learn more about Scrum?

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[veccher]

that's a difficult point for us, we have a product that has been in production for a long time, most of the items in the backlog had no or few relationship between them, just random small improvements on the system, we had a PO and he choosed with PBI he wanted the most, i always asked to try to create a goal first, but he always said "there's no common goal, i need these items, the goal will be 'finish all the items in the sprint' ". Then he left the product, now we don't have a PO, we've improved in this path, but sometimes i have the feeling we are getting low priority items to the sprint and leaving high priority behind just because the items don't fit the goal, let's say that the goal usually is small compared to the size of the sprint, sometimes the goal is too big and we just keep repeating them.

[rmarkend]

Generally speaking, I have found that compound Sprint Goals (SG "and" SG "or" SG) might point to specific areas where you could potentially split your team into multiple teams so that each of them has a commitment for a Sprint. Have you guys seen that too?

[nickmiller]

Something we're struggling with. We are a marketing agency implementing scrum. Each of our teams serve multiple clients. It doesn't make sense to form individual teams for each client. These clients are our stakeholders and they will never collaborate with each other because - well, we don't go out of our way to introduce our clients to one another. As such, their needs are varied. A single Sprint goal for each client is what we're aiming at. Each client will also have their own Product Goal. Would be curious to hear your take on this.

[motishjain]

I manage a scrum team which actively works on feature development for one product but it works on support for 7 different products delivered in the past. Now I cannot have a scrum team for every product because the support work is very less per product and may/may not be there in every sprint. So it would be no use to have different scrum teams for different products. How can I have sprint goals in this team which has threads going on for multiple products in form of either enhancement/support work?

[archiee]

Sprint goal for maintenance teams doing very similar tasks every sprint? Any examples?

[shivambahel]

Hello Ryan and Todd,

You are doing amazing work with these videos and helping the world to Fix their Scrum.

I have question around this topic that if we have 30 Developers in Scrum Team (1 Product) then they should be divided into 3 Scrum Teams (as per Scrum Guide there can be 3-10 Team members in a Scrum Team) and all of them working against one Product Backlog. Here are my queries:
1. During Sprint they should have 3 Sprint backlogs (1 for each team) or 1 ?
- if 3 Sprint Backlog, then there should be 1 Sprint Goal or 3 Sprint Goals.
- if 1 Sprint Backlog, then is it fine if 3 Scrum Teams work against 1 Sprint Goal.
2. In my Scrum Setup of 30 Team Members, Developers want to put 1 Scrum Team (9 team members) to be of only Testers (Automation and Manual). So, that they can pick any PBIs to test and they are not restricted within 1 Scrum Team to pick PBIs of that particular Sprint Backlog.

Please enlighten me with your ideas and suggestion here to fix my Scrum.

[g-ronnmendoza]

What if you have sprint backlog items that are not directly related with each other, meaning different features in your sprint backlog?

[ankurgovil]

Hi Ryan, Todd !
Awesome stuff . Where can we put our questions / e-mails to get answered.

[shivkabra]

I manage a scrum team which supports multiple products (Java based UI and API) used by employees for test data. Team works across multiple products in a sprint and provide support for these products. In this case how we can can only 1 Sprint goal?
Say if I am enhancing 2 products, doing production support and make changes due to infrastructure upgrade.

[stephenreeves]

Enjoying these videos
Question for you - can you measure the maturity of a Scrum Team and if so what are the potential benefits?
Benefit - may give you a baseline and help inform areas to improve in?
Downside - is this subjective and could this be disrespectful to a team?