Lacking Goals

Want to know the best way to demotivate a development team? Keep them from seeing how their work impacts your customers. Likewise, it’s demotivating for a Scrum team when they don’t know how their product relates to the overall mission of the company. This misalignment of value and purpose can make it difficult for a Scrum team to have their own clear goals that reflect larger organizational goals. This cascades all the way down to sprint goals—and without sprint goals, the development team lacks urgency and inspiration. In that situation, the developers become backlog lumberjacks: they chop through features and stories without really understanding why they’re doing that work.

What does this look like in practice?

• Carrying work over across multiple sprints becomes the norm. We’ll finish that PBI in the next sprint, right?

• Your team actually starts using a sprint goal (hurray!) but it’s basically just “finish the sprint backlog” (boo!).

• Quality suffers. We don’t know why we’re doing the work or who it helps, so who cares how good it is?

• Stakeholders get upset. A lack of a product vision equals a vacuum of product leadership that ultimately gets filled by the development team. And there is no way for developers to magically know what customers want, especially if they do not know how their work is impacting customers.

Scrum teams work best when they are aligned with the organization’s goals and customers’ needs. Leadership sets the high-level goals for a company, product visions serve these goals and the customers’ needs, and sprint goals keep Scrum teams aligned with the customers. When this alignment is in place, the Scrum team has purpose. Purpose is a powerful tool that can bring a team together and keep them inspired and motivated to deliver great products.

Does your Scrum team lack goals? This happens when executives fail to advertise company goals clearly or fail to communicate changes to company goals. Goals, from the organizational level cascading all the way down to a Scrum team’s sprint goal, should be measurable and customer-focused. Work with your product owner to clearly understand why your team is doing the work they’re doing. Trace it all the way up to the company’s goals and mission.

During your next retrospective, see if your team can make the connection between their sprint goal and a corporate goal. Ask the product owner and development team to reflect on the sprint goal from a recently completed sprint and have them connect this goal to the product vision, and ultimately to a corporate goal. Making these connections explicit can help the Scrum team stay focused on the impact of their work.