Mastering agile sprint goals for performance

Agile sprints can get messy without clear guidance and shared goals. Establishing clear sprint goals keeps teams aligned and focused.

But how do you set goals that guide your team without limiting creativity? This is a common challenge for Agile PMs.

No need to worry — this guide will show you how to create effective sprint goals and avoid common pitfalls. Let’s get started.

What is a sprint goal?

In the Scrum framework, a sprint goal is a concise statement that aligns the product owner and development team toward a shared sprint outcome.

It’s typically set during the sprint planning meeting, where the Scrum Master, Product Owner, and team collaborate to choose the most valuable user stories or features to deliver.

Sprint goals are crucial for maintaining focus, collaboration, and accountability. They provide a clear objective to guide the team’s efforts throughout the sprint.

Why do sprint goals matter in Agile development?

Sprint goals drive project success by offering:

• Focus and prioritization: They help the team focus on high-value tasks and prioritize work effectively.
• Collaboration and alignment: Shared goals foster teamwork and clear communication.
• Adaptability: Sprint goals provide flexibility to adapt to changes without losing sight of priorities.
• Progress measurement: They give teams a clear target to track performance.
• Motivation: Goals foster commitment and accountability, boosting team morale.
• Continuous improvement: Sprint reviews provide opportunities to refine processes and improve performance.

SMART: The 5 elements of a well-formed sprint goal

The SMART framework provides criteria for establishing precise and effective sprint goals in Agile development. By applying this framework in Agile sprints, teams can better ensure their objectives are clear and attainable. The five elements of a SMART sprint goal are:

1. Specific: Be clear about the exact outcome you’re aiming for.
2. Measurable: Set criteria to track progress and success.
3. Achievable: Keep goals realistic and within reach.
4. Relevant: Ensure goals align with the product vision and stakeholder needs.
5. Time-bound: Goals should be tied to the sprint’s timeframe.

Sprint pre-planning

Setting sprint goals in software development involves a multi-step process that typically includes the Scrum Master, product owner, development team members, and stakeholders.

Before defining the sprint goal, the product owner should organize, update, and prioritize the product backlog items based on the needs of end-users and stakeholders.

This preparation lays a solid foundation for the sprint planning meeting, often called the sprint pre-planning. It helps you to address product management and decision-making challenges early on, ensuring a smoother sprint planning process.

Sprint planning

Once you have a solid foundation, it’s time to move on to the main event. The sprint planning meeting is when you define the sprint goal. This collaborative session involves stakeholders discussing the user stories or features to be developed during the sprint.

But, most critically, it's when we establish a specific goal for the end of the sprint.

Step #1: Backlog review and cleanup

Before setting the next sprint's focus, you review all team requirements. The product owner will present top-priority items from the roadmap, explaining their value. Each user story should include a clear "definition of done" to establish success criteria for the sprint.

Step #2: Capacity planning

The development team estimates the effort for each user story, usually with story points or another method, while considering their sprint capacity, including availability, holidays, and potential obstacles.

Step #3: Story prioritization

Based on capacity and backlog priorities, the team collaboratively selects user stories or features to commit to for the sprint. The focus should naturally emerge from thoughtful backlog prioritization, ensuring alignment with team goals, not random selection.

Step #4: Goal setting

After identifying the user stories or features, the team, along with the PO and Scrum Master, creates a sprint goal that reflects the overall objective, referencing the backlog. The goal should be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

If needed, multiple goals can be set for a sprint, ensuring clarity and actionability, because you’ll review them during the sprint retrospective.

Step #5: Communication

Clearly communicate the sprint goal to all relevant stakeholders, including end-users, sponsors, and project teams. This ensures transparency and helps manage expectations.

Step #6: Commitment

The entire team, including the product owner and Scrum Master, commits to the sprint goal. This commitment ensures accountability, focus, and alignment throughout the sprint.

10 examples of effective sprint goals

What kind of a sprint goal makes sense for your team? Of course, it depends on the items you're pulling from the backlog.

But, applying the SMART goal framework, here are some sprint goal examples your team might set based on the work items in the queue:

1. Optimize the front-end code and back-end database queries to decrease the average load time of the main page from five seconds to three seconds.
2. Increase unit test coverage for the "payment processing" module from 70 percent to 85 percent, ensuring newly written tests cover important edge cases.
3. Focus on resolving bugs related to data integrity and UI consistency to reduce the number of open bugs in the "user profile" feature by 50 percent.
4. Refactor the "inventory management" module to improve code readability and maintainability, reducing the average cyclomatic complexity of functions by 20 percent.
5. Complete the development and testing of the "wishlist" feature for the e-commerce app, ensuring it's ready for user acceptance testing.
6. Prepare two-factor authentication for the user login process for internal testing.
7. Enhance the "order management" API's efficiency by reducing the average response time from 200ms to 150ms.
8. Improve the user experience of the mobile app's checkout process by reducing the number of steps from five to three.
9. Update and complete the API documentation, ensuring all 26 endpoints have detailed descriptions, examples, and error responses.
10. Deploy "event tracking" feature for initial user feedback and testing.

Common pitfalls to avoid when setting sprint goals

Avoid these common mistakes when setting sprint goals, because they can undermine the team's ability to achieve objectives:

• Lack of clarity: Make sure the goal is clear and actionable.
• Unrealistic expectations: Set achievable goals within the sprint’s timeframe.
• Focusing on output, not value: Ensure goals deliver real value, not just completed tasks.
• Ignoring stakeholders: Align goals with the needs of end-users and stakeholders.
• Poor planning: Invest time in proper estimation and planning.
• Excluding the team: Involve the entire team in the goal-setting process.

Keep track of your sprint goals with Dashboard Hub Pro

Once your sprint goals are set, visibility is key. Both teams and stakeholders should have easy access to the goals of each sprint. But not every management software makes it possible out of the box.

For example, Jira Software doesn’t allow for tracking sprint goals in reporting dashboards. So if you want to include the information about goal completion in your report, you have to do it manually. Fortunately, Dashboard Hub Pro fixes that issue.

Add the Sprint Goal gadget to your reporting dashboard to to give stakeholders live updates on goal progress.

Dashboard Hub Pro also includes additional Scrum gadgets. They’ll gain live insights on current Sprint Blockers, their actual Sprint Velocity, Sprint Health, and more. You can even track the progress of entire epics to get the bigger picture of how work is progressing.

Want to take your Jira reporting to the next level? Dashboard Hub Pro can help. Build dashboards with custom charts, formula cards, and 100+ pre-built metrics. Combine data from more than 15 product integrations for centralized reports that can be securely shared. Try it for free for 30 days.