How do you align sprint goals with your product vision?

A strong Product Vision should set direction and a good litmus test is whether it helps you to say no to things. If it doesn't help set direction and with excluding from the things you could be doing, then it is a weak Product Vision. The other thing is that you need an effective Product Strategy. Having a Product Vision is not enough.

Once your product vision is clear, make sure to build a team-wide product backlog, listing all the required features to deliver to materialize your product vision. Such list might contain end-user features or internal features ensuring performance, stability or debugging easiness. Each sprint will pick items from this product backlog.

Product Vision is the only thing you need in a software development project. Everything else follows from the Product Vision.

~Vision > Product Strategy (Business & User Goals, Market, Key factors, Differentiators) > Goal Oriented Product Roadmap > Product Goal ( fetched from goal oriented PR) > Product Backlog > Sprint Goal > Sprint Backlog ~Define an inspiring Vision. ~Create a strategy that helps realise your vision. ~Goal oriented Product Roadmap states how the strategy is implemented and how the product is likely to evolve in future over a longer timeframe (eg - 1 year) ~Product Goal on Roadmap determines the right contents of Product Backlog ~Create Sprint Goals to achieve the Product Goal. SG defines the content of Sprint Backlog ~Inspect and Adapt ** Refer Roman Pichler work for more details

Product vision should clearly have a - 1. Purpose 2. Value 3. Differentiator This should be aligned to business vision and goals. We can also build product charters that align the overall product vision to multiple teams who own the charter. From the product vision / charter sprint goals should be defined so that the entire team is aligned to contribute to the larger business goals.

Aligning sprint goals with your product vision involves connecting your immediate tasks with the bigger picture. Begin by breaking down your larger product vision into smaller, doable tasks. When planning each sprint, make sure the tasks you pick directly contribute to your overall vision. Keep checking that your sprint goals match your big product goal. Talk openly with your team to make sure everyone understands and stays on track. By keeping these two levels in sync, you make sure every small step you take is moving you closer to your final goal.

In agile team, formalizing the sprint goals in understandable words is one of the key responsibility of the Product Owner. As she liaises with all the different stakeholders, she shall be able to gather all the sprint members around a common understanding of the goal.

1-The main source of Sprint goals is project or product release plans. 2- availabe resources in team for this sprint. Base on these we can set realistic and achievable Sprint goals.

Theoretically the idea of having a outcome based approach is ideal. But in large scale implementations especially in a banking products or in products with multiple legacy integration touch points, a sprint goal might not always deliver tangential outcomes impacting the end customer.

I like to use sprint goals as a business description of what you will be demonstrating to your stakeholders/customers/users at the end of the sprint. Start with the end in mind. Each sprint goal should be traceable back to the product goal, as in it should be evident how it rolls back up.

This part is inaccurate because you don't prioritize Sprint Goals. The Sprint Goal is conceived during Sprint Planning, so you will only have one Sprint Goal active at a time. You will not have multiple Sprint Goals for a team, as then it's not a Sprint Goal, which is intended to be a singular and cohesive objective. However, a Product can have multiple Product Goals, and these may be prioritized. According to the Scrum Guide, there is only a single Product Goal per Product, but that's too rigid from my experience.

Agree with Maarten, however if it was reworded to Product Goal, it makes sense. E.g. Prioritise Product Goals based on value

In reference to Maarten’s comment, I think this part of the text assumes one goal per sprint. From context; the product vision has been broken down into multiple goals achievable per sprint. We can then prioritize which goal delivers the most value based on user pain points and product vision.

This part is inaccurate because Scrum has no Agile ceremonies or daily stand-ups. You also don't review the Sprint Goal, but you review the Product Increment that produces lagging outcomes and compare that to the Sprint Goal (or Product Goal) you set out to reach. Sprint Velocity and Burndown charts are pretty useless to monitor and evaluate your Sprint Goals, as they should be outcome-oriented. You can use them to monitor progress toward outputs. Since a Sprint Goal is created once during Sprint Planning, there is no need to evaluate your Sprint Goals continuously. You should evaluate the outcomes you're producing.

Agile meetings are not called ceremonies, they are called Events in scrum. Metrics like those listed are a leading indicator to the achievement of sprint goals, they wont measure the outcomes.

Before reviewing the sprint goals, you need to effectively respect the scope and timing of the current sprint. Lost of teams do not respect them, creating longer and longer sprint, and letting the some team members (being product owner, developers, sales or CxOs) add new features during the sprint. This is one of the most common distraction that unfocused team away from the sprint goals and, hence, away from the product vision.

Really when we look at the scrum, the daily meetings do not deal with the outcome in most scenarios, but revisiting the sprint goal and identifying possible risks or impediments in the day-to-day of the sprint makes all the difference in possible pivots, reprioritizations and decision-making (inspection it is even one of the pillars of agility as a whole).

Metrics mentioned here like `sprint velocity, burndown charts` are not useful for checking alignment with the vision. Product visions are usually more abstract (compare it with a user story for instance). Hence many of our efforts failed when we tried to build a `metric` around it. Alignment should always be discussed and debated.

This is an excellent question- alignment of sprint goals with product vision. In my experience , very few agile product development efforts get this right , and its not easy to do so either. The tips given above in the LinkedIn community article are strong starting points. I would reinforce to use the 3 core agile tenets - transparency, inspection, and adaptation to continually refine and strengthen this alignment - its an ongoing process and may even be a bit different between subsequent sprints...

I see a lot about Sprint Goals but I’m missing the Product Goal(s). Your first step in having your Sprint Goals aligned with your Product Vision is having a Product Goal that’s aligned with your Product Vision. You use the Sprint Goals to reach your Product Goal. Your Product Goal you periodically evaluate to check if it’s till valid. When valid, your Sprint Goal helps reach your Product Goal. When the Sprint Goal is set for that Sprint, you don’t change it. When the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete, the Product Owner can cancel the Sprint.

Not everything in the Sprint has to relate to the Sprint Goal. It's fine if you have other things in the Sprint too. You shouldn't plan your Sprint at full capacity with all work relating to the Sprint Goal, as then there is no room to deal with the unexpected or the unknown. Sprint Goals should promote flexibility, collaboration and dealing with surprises. They should enable a Scrum Team to be flexible on the scope of what they're doing. After the Sprint starts: 1. Resources are fixed (number of people on Scrum Team). 2. Quality is fixed (Definition of Done) 3. Time is fixed (Sprint length) Therefore scope must be flexible. The Sprint Goal must enable flexibility on scope, otherwise, you will inadvertently create tech debt.

Aligning sprint goals with your product vision involves: Vision Clarity: Ensure everyone understands the overarching product vision. Prioritization: Select sprint goals that directly contribute to advancing the product vision. Backlog Alignment: Map backlog items to the vision and choose those with the highest alignment. Regular Reviews: Regularly review sprint goals against the product vision to maintain alignment. Adaptation: Adjust sprint goals as the product vision evolves to ensure continued alignment and relevance.

One of the ways to stay on track within a sprint is to avoid scope creep by staying agile. In some of very small teams, the same engineers who have to work towards a sprint goal may also be responsible for providing support to bugs that may arise from a product in use. Consider allocating a fraction of time, or story-points, to account for such issues that may arise. And where that allocation is exhausted within a sprint, review priorities. You may have to take out a task of similar complexity to accommodate for support issues particularly in cases where there’s no distinct support team.