Is the Retro or Sprint Review the Most Important Agile Event?
First of all, it’s a silly question I realize. But most agile coaches you ask will tell you that they think the Retrospective is the most important agile event. Because *the team* stands to benefit from continuous improvement, a mindset of experimentation, the healthy aspects of inspecting and adapting, the psychological safety that leads to sharing, and the focus on learning. And while all of these things are crucial to a team working well together and growing their agile mindset, I’ve come to think that the impact the Sprint Review is bigger for a few reasons, but mostly because it has impact beyond the team.
But first, how does the Sprint Review benefit the team?
My favorite thing about pausing every sprint to celebrate the team’s wins, share what they’ve learned, and what value they’ve delivered is how it helps develop the skills of thinking iteratively. If the team asks for feedback on small bits of progress, they learn more of what to do next as well as what NOT to do. We build products like an onion, inside out, one layer at a time. This feedback loop is critical for a team learning to work iteratively. First we decide “What’s the smallest piece of value we can deliver that we can learn from next?” After the outcome-oriented user stories are written, the team decides HOW to deliver those stories and presents their results to the Product Owner and stakeholders for feedback.
There are other secondary benefits for the team as well. The preparation and communication of value, even the public speaking that comes with presenting your completed work all has great benefit to the team members who participate.
There’s also the obvious benefit of learning to work at a sustainable pace. Whether the team is estimating using storypoints or somehow setting expectations about what they are working on in the next upcoming sprint, the team learns to hold themselves accountable to not taking on too much work and being diligent about priotitization of the backlog (and the sprint backlog) to be sure they can fulfill the promise to deliver value predictably. “Our team guarantees that we are working on the absolute most important outcomes for our customers at all times and will deliver incremental and demonstrable value every two weeks!”
How does the Sprint Review’s impact extend beyond the team?
In most organizations, there’s a heavy focus on making teams awesome. The training and coaching is often focused 100% on individual teams, so that they learn the agile mindset and as the manifesto says: ‘learn through doing’. But what is often neglected are the stakeholders, the middle managers, the subject matter experts, business analysts, business sponsors, and various business liaisons and support staff. (I’ll collectively call these people stakeholders, but this collection of people will vary widely between organizations.)
What the Sprint Review has the potential to do, if we do it right, is to help educate and co-opt our stakeholders into our agile mission. By showing up and witnessing the Sprint Review, they are learning about how we work. We tell the stakeholders what we think is important to work on next. We ask for their advice and feedback on where we should focus. We switch gears based on their input. And then we deliver value again in another two weeks. They show up and they see us deliver, give us feedback, see us change direction, and deliver some more. This reinforces many aspects of the new ways of working.
Most stakeholders who have worked with technologists in the past are still thinking in 12 month project plans and big bang weekend deliveries with huge milestones, chock full of features. So, we are slowly helping them realize the world has changed. And they will ask you, “So when will that big huge feature and this other feature be delivered?” And if your answer is in the language of agile, you will help them learn about prioritization, sprint planning, roadmapping, and even be able to give them a guess or range of when it might be delivered, given the priorities and relative size of other work that must come first in your backlog.
So, please keep in mind that your Sprint Review is putting your agile process in the spotlight as well. Our role is also to educate those around us. Start the event by reminding everyone why they’re there. “We are here today to celebrate the value of the work we have completed and to ask for feedback on whether it is in fact valueable. We invite you to ask questions and participate in helping us decide what we work on next. Our goal and promise is to always be delivering the work that is most valuable to our customer, so you should expect our priorities to shift as the business and customers needs shift as well. You are all here as agents in this process and we welcome your feedback and comments!”
Also, do not hesitate to share any “failures” or learnings during the sprint. Being transparent about what you thought would work is just as important. There will always be challenges like work being delayed through dependencies off-team, or work being underestimated. Do not shy away from sharing these facts as well. Your transparency builds trust and your stakeholders will appreciate the honesty even if they are disappointed in the results.
Whenever I work as an agile coach for a team or deliver a Scrum Master or Product Owner workshop, I always congratulate the team members and tell them they are now part of the company’s agile change agents! In every transformation, there are pockets of agile working well, but it’s up to those who get it to keep it going. It’s like the future described by William Gibson: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
My hope is that you will continue practicing and showcasing your agile process so others will learn from it and learn how to work better with you.
If you enjoyed this, please clap and share. It means a lot to know my work on this blog is read and used by agilists out there in the world.
Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
How well is your team “being agile”? Our self-assessment tool focuses on 24 topics of modern ways of working including the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking. It comes with deep links into the Practical Agilist Guidebook to aid continuous improvement in teams of any kind. Learn more at MakeTeamsAwesome.com
The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an agile coach showing you why the topic is important, what you can start doing about it, scrum master tips, AI prompts to dig deeper, and tons of third party references describing similar perspectives. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com
Follow me here on Medium, subscribe, or find me on LinkedIn, or Twitter.
