Product Owner/Scrum Master’s Checklist for Sprint Ceremonies

1. Backlog Grooming

1. Remove outdated user stories and tasks
2. Add new user stories to reflect newly discovered user insights.
3. Break down broad user stories into smaller items.
4. Reorder user stories based on their priority.
5. Explain and clearly define user stories and tasks to avoid uncertainty and “black box” communication.
6. Assign or re-assign story points and estimates.
7. Identify roadblocks and minimize backlog item risks

2. Sprint Planning

Before the sprint planning meeting, the Product Owner identifies the items with the greatest value and works towards getting them to a ready state by:

• Assigning a relative story point value
• Removing dependencies
• Creating testable examples
• Defining acceptance criteria
• Meeting INVEST criteria for Agile user stories: Independent · Negotiable · Valuable · Estimable · Small · Testable

Sprint planning meeting checklist:

1. Come prepared with data and estimated story points
2. Confirm estimated story points for all items on the backlog or atleast in the next sprint)
3. Decide on the items to move to the new sprint
4. Determine the team’s capacity for the sprint and compare it with the total story points proposed
5. End the meeting with a Q&A to ensure everyone’s on the same page

3. Sprint Review

1. Attendance and participation of the scrum Team, product owner, and invited key stakeholders.
2. The PO should report the items in the Product Backlog; what backlog items have been done and what have not.
3. PO marks as done the items that have met the definition of done.
4. Development team discusses what went well, the problems they experienced and what they did to resolve the problems.
5. Development team demonstrates their completed work and their increment.
6. PO leads the discussion on the where the product backlog currently stands and set projected completion dates based on the progress of the sprint.
7. The group establishes the next steps in this meeting to give valuable input to the next sprint planning.
8. Review factors like timeline, budget, capabilities and marketplace to determine the next anticipated product release.

4. Sprint Retro

Image from https://retrospectivewiki.org/index.php?title=The_Prime_Directive

Below is one framework to do this:

1. Collect:
   Gather insights on the below sections and add the cards on the board to the respective column:
   What was successful in the Sprint?
   What didn’t go right?
   What will we commit to improving in the upcoming Sprint?
2. Group and Vote
   Group similar cards collected from different users and the team votes for what they believe are the most important cards from the retrospective
3. Act
   This step is to take action on the suggestions made by the team. For example, we can create a miscellaneous task to customize notifications so that all developers are alerted of every new work item.

Here are some cool sprint retro templates.

This is the seventh among a series of articles by Adithya Sailesh, aimed at consolidating the product management knowledge that I gained from my structured and otherwise learning journey and successful career switch from software development to product management that started over a year ago. The primary goal of this series is to help aspiring/beginner product managers by comprehensively covering all the essential fundamentals, making this leap a lot easier and fruitful.