A PM’s Actionable Guide On Running Effective Sprint Planning Remotely

Are you finding running planning sessions in a fully remote environment difficult? 

Don’t worry, you’re definitely not the only one. 

I’ve heard many PMs around me concerned about how effective their Sprint Planning is in a full remote setup. 

Uncomfortable blanks, less engagement from your team, endless discussions around priorities… 

Your role as a PM is to adapt to this new remote situation. 

Hang on, here are a few tips I’ve been using as a Senior Product Manager at DAZN and TravelPerk to improve the efficiency of my own Sprint Planning in a fully remote environment. 

A new reality that many of us have to get used to.

What are the main components of an efficient Sprint Planning? 

Let's imagine the fairly traditional 2-weeks Sprint situation with all the traditional scrum reunions such as Dailies, Refinement, Demo.

The role of the Planning meeting is to set the expectations and invite the entire agile team to choose what to work on for the next Sprint. 

Typically, a PM will run a Sprint Planning into the two following parts:

Part 1 – Close the previous Sprint and define the Scope of the coming Sprint

Before jumping into the coming Sprint, take the time to go through the previous Sprint you're about to close. 

If you have a 30 minutes long meeting, dedicate at least 5 minutes. 

Go through the burn-up or burn-down charts and invite for a succinct introspective on why things happened the way they did. 

Don't take too much time, though, as you can do that during a Retrospective meeting, but it's still quite important to mark the end of the previous Sprint. 

This will also allow the entire team to see what's potentially going to be carried over into your next Sprint.

I usually start the coming Sprint by giving the Sprint Goals.

Sprint Goals

Giving Sprints a clear goal will provide transparency to your entire team on what you're trying to achieve for the coming Sprint! 

This might sound like a given to many; however, it's fairly common to see in bigger Scrum teams that developers get lost between all the tasks during a Sprint.

That's even more true if you're running longer Sprints (2 weeks or monthly Sprints), so it's quite essential to give them clarity on the overall Sprint goal. 

I suggest using the SMART Criteria to define your Sprint Goals. 

Don't skip this part of the Sprint planning.

Too often I've heard developers get lost in the middle of a Sprint due to a lack of direction. 

Take your time to go through it. I'd suggest allocating at least 5 minutes to talk through the why of these goals.

Part 2 - Plan the coming Sprint

It's important for the PM to do the exercise of prioritizing the backlog before the planning in order to have a clean and prioritized backlog to look at during the Planning meeting.

I build my own custom 4 “sub-backlogs” within my JIRA (or Asana or any backlog tool you're using) to classify my tasks: 

Backlog --> Ready for Refinement --> Refined --> To be picked. 

This helps me have a much cleaner Backlog that everyone in the company can easily understand.

As a PM, your role is to make sure that the tasks in your backlog are already prioritized (using whatever prioritization approach suits you best - RICE, ICE...There are loads to choose from). Learn more about prioritization here.

If you've done your job correctly, then this part should be a piece of cake. 

At this stage, the entire team will be involved in selecting the tasks that should be pre-prioritized by the PM and put them into the next Sprint to-dos. 

Planning meetings

Planning meetings are not a self-validation exercise with you running the show! On the contrary, Planning meetings should be interactive and invite the entire team to share what they think could bring more impact! 

How? 

E.g. It could be done by using markers on the whiteboard. This part can become a bit more complex in a full remote situation.

At this stage, don't forget about anything that might impact your Sprint timings (e.g. holidays, company meetings, etc.) even more so in a full remote situation, things like childcare can happen.

Don’t worry if you don’t get it right! 

Very few teams get this part right from the first tries, it takes time for a team to refine their voting and estimations approaches. 

More than ever I would encourage any PM in a full remote situation to run Retrospectives frequently, as a PM your role will be to adapt your Sprint Plannings based on your team feedback.

Never underestimate the power of Retros!

Learn more about Richard's tricks to effectively run remote sprint planning, in his blog article.

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