How to Write and Use a Sprint Goal (With 5 Templates)

Creating effective Sprint Goals is like writing clues for a scavenger hunt. Make them too detailed, and you kill the fun. Provide insufficient guidance, and nobody finds the treasure. Besides striking that tricky balance, you may find that you need to write your Sprint Goal in a hurry, minutes before the hunt starts.

Drafting a Sprint Goal never seems like the highest priority at the end of one sprint and the beginning of another. Yet an effective Sprint Goal can make or break your Sprint.

In this article, we’ll show you how to write a great Sprint Goal for your team. We’ll cover:

A Sprint Goal is a short statement that gives your Sprint purpose, direction, and focus. It is often written by the Product Owner and helps the Scrum team with prioritization, progress measurement, and decision making in all Scrum events, including Sprint Planning, the Daily Scrum, Retrospectives, Sprint Reviews, and during the Sprint itself.

The development team focuses its efforts to achieving the Sprint Goal during the Sprint, which is usually timeboxed to 2 weeks. Usually, the aim is to deliver an increment – a working product update that solves a customer problem. You can also set a Sprint Goal to test an assumption or reduce risk, like addressing technical debt.

Here’s an explanation we’ve used in the past to show the Sprint Goal’s relation to other Scrum artifacts:

You don’t need to start from scratch when drafting a Sprint Goal. Here are several handy Sprint Goal templates and frameworks you can follow.

Scrum.org‘s template is straightforward and doesn’t need much effort to fill out.

An example from their article of this template in action:

Roman Pichler, a product management expert, arguably has the most referenced Sprint Goal template on the internet – all links seem to lead to his.

It’s more work to complete than the Scrum.org template, but you’ll have a more detailed and fail-proof goal.

As you can see in the image above, Roman’s template is extensive. It requires you to fill out a goal, the method, and the metrics you’ll track. Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/.

The Scrum.org Sprint Goal example might look as follow using Roman’s template:

Guy Maslen, a Scrum Master from New Zealand, defines a feature, advantage, and benefit in his Sprint Goals:

Guy gives this example of a goal based on this framework: “One-click creation of a PowerPoint from <panel display tool>, so you can easily share results with customers, saving time.”

Agile coach Luke Salvoni suggests teams write their Sprint Goals as newspaper headlines. How would be the front-pages talk about your successful Sprint?

Luke says this helps make Sprint Goals short, snappy, and SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

An example of a goal-as-a-headline could be: “Team Raphael demonstrates feature XYZ shaving $100 off hosting costs per customer.”

Our own rule of thumb – which you can combine with the other templates covered here – is that your Sprint Goal should fit in a Tweet. Ideally it should be no more than 140 characters. But you can push it up to 280 if you need to.

Here’s a Sprint Goals infographic you can share with your team to inspire them.

Now that you’ve drafted up your Sprint Goal, check it against these six points to make sure it will be effective.

Effective Sprint Goals state what you want to accomplish during your Sprint and why doing so is valuable.

By embedding purpose in your Sprint Goal, the team better understands what you’re trying to achieve and the expected outcome. They can then use that knowledge to propose better ways to reach that objective during Sprint Planning or find solutions when problems arise in the Sprint.

A Sprint Goal example with and without purpose:

An effective Sprint creates customer value or positively impacts the business. You can ensure your Sprint Goal is delivering value by making the expected impact on the user or business explicit.

Ask these questions to test your Sprint Goal:

Beware of bland statements like “because it helps the marketing team” or “as it increases profit.”

Make your goal specific and meaningful instead, and ask for clarification from stakeholders if you can’t. Ambiguity leads to misunderstandings during the Sprint that can cause team members to push in different directions.

An example of a Sprint Goal with and without considering the user or business:

Including a desired outcome makes the Sprint Goal binary. This helps you know without a doubt if the team achieved it. You either fulfilled the outcome, or you didn’t.

An outcome isn’t the same as output. The output reflects an action, whereas the outcome is a measured result.

An output goal is to A/B test the signup CTA button on a landing page to see which variation gives the highest conversion.

An outcome goal is to gain a total of 1,000 new customers through that same landing page, and a way to do so is by A/B testing the signup mechanism.

An example of a Sprint Goal with and without an outcome:

More experienced teams should consider setting ambitious Sprint Goals to speed up progress and learning. You won’t achieve some of those goals, and that’s okay.

Failure gives you data and insights you can learn from, as long as you:

Such learning leads to continuous improvement, an agile principle that’s an essential part of the Scrum framework. Learn and improve something every Sprint, and your performance and product quality can at least double.

An example of a Sprint Goal with and without fear of failure:

The Product Owner brings one or more draft Sprint Goals to Sprint Planning, and the development team needs to embrace and – almost literally – run with the goal.

Trusting the team to plan how they do the work is an essential agile principle. This means they contribute and consent to the final wording of the Sprint Goal.

Now that’s Scrum theory. In reality, Product Owners – often under stakeholder pressure – might dictate a Sprint Goal. But once you cross – or rather burn – that bridge, you create a downward spiral that’s impossible to escape.

The team will not take ownership of a dictated goal. That’s why it’s important to make sure the team’s voice is represented in the final Sprint Goal.

An example of a Sprint Goal that sides with the team and one that doesn’t:

A well-defined, targeted Sprint Goal essentially is a decision about what’s important in this Sprint and everything else that’s not.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs: A focused Sprint Goal isn’t just about saying yes to one thing but also no to a hundred other things you could be doing this Sprint.

This advice is easy to understand but hard to follow. Most Product Owners have many stakeholders, each with lists of high-priority items. You want to avoid bloated Sprint Goals that lead nowhere at best and often to disaster. One way of doing so is keeping Sprint Goals tightly defined and specific.

An example of a slim Sprint Goal and one that’s not:

A well-crafted Sprint Goal is a helpful tool throughout your Sprint.

Here’s a final checklist of how effective agile teams put their goals to use.

Effective agile teams use their Sprint Goal to:

Let’s end with Scrum.org‘s sum-up of the usefulness of having a Sprint Goal:

Feel free to use this Sprint Goal checklist with your team when setting Sprint Goals!