Conducting Meaningful Sprint Reviews

Co-written by Shalom Chin and Kaitlyn Peng

The Sprint Review is a special time to connect with stakeholders and customers to establish a working partnership and get their feedback about the product. Besides the Scrum Team’s increments, artifacts such as the updated release burndown chart and the updated team velocity are shared with both stakeholders and customers to foster transparency and manage expectations.

However, this important Scrum Event constantly gets simplified into a “demo”. In more undesirable situations, feedback received is not captured and properly incorporated because the team is being rushed into the next Sprint. Let's remember that this is called the Sprint Review, not the Product Review. That means that together with our stakeholders and customers, the entirety of the Sprint should be reviewed. Did we deliver value? When will the value be felt by our users? Were we working on the right thing? How satisfied are our customers with the product? Should we focus on other higher-priority backlog items? Is there anything that is stopping the team from accelerating that the stakeholders and customers can help resolve?

In this article, we detail a list of steps to conduct more meaningful Sprint Reviews for any Scrum Team to consider.

1. Open the conversation by reminding the attendees of the Sprint goal and its progress. People tend to easily forget things, especially when they are busy. Starting the review with a reminder of the product vision and the sprint goal helps align everyone. If the team has partially accomplished the goal or has not delivered on its commitments, use this event as an opportunity to explore how the attendees can help the team remove the impediments. In addition, ensure that the people with the power to help are invited to this review. It would be good to share the data such as the velocity from the last three Sprints or other metrics to give insights into the potential root causes of the problem.
2. Demo and collect feedback. Don’t just show how the new feature or increment works but study how the attendees interact with the product. Improve the product by understanding the user behaviors and identifying the features that satisfy them. Make sure the feedback is rigorously captured for deeper analysis later. Ask explicitly about the changes which the users would like to see. Quality of the feedback matters. Find out the core issues that the users are facing without going into details of the exact solution. The Scrum team is encouraged to actively participate in this session to get to know their customers better.
3. Determine what is completed and what needs rework. Then update the product backlog, team velocity, and release burndown. For items that require rework, create an item in the backlog and verify the written changes in the presence of the customers. You can refine the items later before the Sprint planning. In addition, Scrum Masters will update the team velocity for each Sprint, and Product Owners will update the release burndown. Make these transparent to the stakeholders so that their expectations of delivered value can be better managed and concerns on any open items can be openly discussed.
4. Share team learnings and discoveries. The Scrum team should use this time to share insights into developing the increments so that attendees can have a better appreciation of the complexities faced in developing the desired features. This raises the awareness of the stakeholders and customers about the engineering challenges. We hope that through this sharing, the attendees will build up empathy for the team, simplify development-heavy features and adjust delivery expectations.
5. Give stakeholders and customers time to provide market/ business updates. Updates from the business side reveal a lot about what the market or customers are saying about your product. This intel is important in shaping the upcoming Sprint Backlog. The Product Owner will use this new information to adjust the Product Backlog and add new items to address market/business risks. The key is to adapt the product so that it is not lagging behind the competition. We want to reduce the risk of the Product becoming obsolete.
6. Share the items prioritized for the upcoming Sprint and gather feedback. This helps to align the upcoming Sprint with the stakeholders and customers so that the team is confident that they are building increments of value in each Sprint. Use this time to clarify the items that can be put off at a later date or are unnecessary. Product Owners should update and re-order the backlog to reflect the feedback given.

This list of steps is a guide for conducting Sprint Reviews and is not exhaustive. There are other activities that you can explore doing with the attendees. We encourage you to experiment and iterate on the Sprint Review.

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