How can you make sure your sprint goals are realistic and achievable?

Ensuring sprint goals are realistic and achievable involves collaborative planning, considering team capacity, and prioritizing high-priority user stories. Regularly reassessing and adjusting goals based on feedback and team dynamics contributes to maintaining a realistic and achievable sprint scope. Open communication and transparency within the team foster a shared understanding of the goals, enabling better alignment and commitment to successful sprint outcomes.

The issue I see way too often is that organizations claim to be Agile but they operate in a very autocratic custom built fashion with lose ties to Agile. Organizations need at least one meeting a month to review the Agile manifesto. If they are deviating, they need to correct their path. Mixing of methodologies is like riding two horses at once. It is very risky and only a few can do it successfully. AA&Co used to have Method /1. Every firm engagement around the globe followed that methodology. Deliverables were consistently created and projects were completed per the plan. Scope changed for sure but it was clearly documented, communicated and approved. The point is good things come from being consistent to your methodology.

It is very strange to see suggestion "Involve the team" in this article about Sprint Goals... does it make sense to do this without team involvement??? Sprint Goals are created by the team for the team. Product Goal is like a North Star, which shows everyone a direction and helps to align. Sprint Goal enables team to Inspect and Adapt on the daily basis their actions and decisions and is on of crucial agility enabling constraints.

The goal should always come from a user's point of view. Sometimes the teams find it hard to elaborate a sprint goal around technical initiatives. And we should always ask ourselves: "What are the benefits for our customers when we deliver this?".

I wouldn't approach it necessarily that way. When you have a feature to release, you should deliver it incrementally: (1) At that point, you should have the user stories created already in a visible way with all associated user stories; (2) Those should be estimated and ready for the upcoming sprint; (3) Get one of the vertical slices and compare the estimations against the team's average velocity. You may need to slice it a bit more; (4) Now we can state the sprint goal and make it clear how our customers can benefit from it. As an example, in a new report of leads, deliver first a list for the month. As a second increment, add a date filter. And go on, until you reach a point of having something more important for the team to tackle.