3 Ways Product Owners Can Help with a Great Sprint Planning
A great Sprint Planning session sets the tone for the entire Sprint. Your team leaves the session energized, excited, and with a clear picture of how to hit the ground running in the new Sprint. But, what if things don’t go as well as you’d hoped? Then your team will leave the session tired and frustrated. They will leave without a clear idea of how to get started on their new set of work. They may even leave without any idea of what their goal for the next Sprint even is.
If you’re a Product Owner, you may appreciate the importance of the Sprint Planning session but consider a successful planning session the responsibility of the Scrum Master. While this may be true, there are a few simple tricks that you can use to help your team get the most out of this critical ceremony.
Paint a Clear Picture
The Sprint Planning session is your opportunity to paint a clear picture of the upcoming Sprint and the objective that you hope to complete. But to do so, you must come prepared with both an engaging vision for your team as well as fully prepared to discuss the details of each Product Backlog item that you’ve selected to support that vision.
The details that you provide will be essential for helping your team appreciate the depth and complexity of the items that you’ve selected. And, it's these details that will help your team give as accurate of an estimate, as possible.
Mind Your Body Language
Just accept it, it's going to happen. Sometimes your team will throw an estimate on an item that’s higher than you expected. But when it does happens, how you react will play a major role in setting the tone for your relationship with your team.
On many teams, the Product Owner is treated as a figure of implicit authority. For this reason, it’s imperative that you be acutely aware of your body language, facial expressions, or any other behavior that may put pressure on your team to reduce their estimates. Even if this pressure is inadvertent.
Pressuring your team to reduce their estimates won’t reduce the actual work behind the estimate and will only make your job harder. This is because your own long-term planning lives and dies by the validity of the estimates that your team provides. If you pressure your team into giving inaccurate estimates then it will be your release plan that suffers in the end.
Instead of applying pressure, take this opportunity to ask questions. Why is the estimate higher than you expected? Or, what hidden complexity exists in the item that you didn’t see before? Taking the time to understand why the estimate is higher than you expected may reduce your chances of being surprised in the future. In fact, it may even uncover an alternative path to achieving the same goal with less complexity.
Remember That Estimates Are a Forecast
Above all, remember that the estimates your team provides are a forecast...not a commitment. Holding a team to their estimates creates a culture of fear. And, in such cultures, your team will invariably begin to sandbag their estimates to protect themselves from the possibility of occasionally under-estimating an item.
Once this happens, your team will begin to continually pad their estimates to create a larger and larger margin of safety. The result, of course, being that the amount of actual work completed each Sprint will continue to dwindle.
But, there's an even worse casualty of this trend. Learning can only occur when a team feels safe enough to embark on experiments and learn from their failures. If a team is punished for every mistake then all learning will eventually cease. And, without the ability to learn, your organization cannot hope to compete in the world of product development.
Helping Your Team Succeed
The role of the Product Owner is easily one of the most important roles on a Scrum Team but is also arguably the most difficult. The Sprint Planning session is your opportunity to invest in your relationship with your team each Sprint. Because it's only with an ongoing investment in that relationship will your product see long-term success in the market.