Everything You Need to Know About Sprint Planning

More and more companies are adopting agile approaches and encouraging teams to start working in sprints. This way of organizing work, proven by thousands of organizations, fosters people to get more done and management to fast-forward their inert projects. If you haven’t run one yourself or experience troubles, we’ve got a guide for you. The better prepared you are before a sprint, the more likely you are to meet your goals. Consider paying attention to the following aspects:
What is sprint planning?
First things first, a sprint is usually a two-week period of time during which specific tasks must be completed based on what the team has prioritized to deliver to the end user soon. In our previous article, we’ve related a number of reasons why you should work in agile sprints. It’s important not to forget that the main purpose of sprints is to deliver frequently. Before cutting to the chase of how you can streamline sprint planning and increase your team’s speed, let’s look into what sprint planning is.
Sprint planning is a meeting dedicated to one of the Scrum ceremonies, where the team collaborates to agree upon work it’ll be able to complete during the upcoming sprint. Sprint planning sessions are needed to set the foundation for the project and drive the team’s boat at the most optimal pace during the next couple of weeks. To run a successful sprint, you’ll need to know how to organize work and plan activities that can be finished in a short period of time. The purpose of a sprint planning meeting is to identify the sprint goal and sprint backlog.
- Sprint Goal: This refers to what can be delivered during the sprint.
- Sprint Backlog: The list of tasks to be completed during the sprint to achieve that goal.
What happens during the sprint planning meeting? Let’s say you’re planning to develop a new important product feature or work on a marketing campaign. During the sprint planning session, the team members will have to ‘groom’ the backlog and say which tasks they’ll work on.

You might think that planning for the next couple of weeks is the easiest thing you’ve ever done. But there’s another side of the coin. The work you’ve planned must fulfill the goal set. This can only happen if you have a healthy backlog. According to Atlassian, a healthy backlog carries out three things:
- Prioritizes each work item, with the most important work listed at the top
- Includes fully-formed user stories the development team can begin to execute on
- Contains an up-to-date estimate for each work item.
Pay attention: To cover a two-week sprint, consider holding a two-hour sprint planning meeting. Ideally, the meeting should be held early in the week so as not to disrupt the team’s flow by the weekend. The question is, who should be present at your sprint planning meeting?
Roles involved in agile sprint planning
Generally, the key roles involved in agile sprint planning — the product owner, scrum master, and the team all need to attend, especially if it’s part of the agile process in software development companies. Let’s take a look at each role.
The Scrum Master: Facilitates the meeting
The scrum master’s role in sprint planning is to make the meeting go as smooth as possible. They book meeting rooms, provide the supplies, align people who participate, make sure that connectivity is in place, and get rid of all potential distractions that could hinder the process. In simple words, they clear up the way for teams to focus on the most important thing — the backlog and the very planning and prioritization. They should also identify the length of the sprint and the best time to hold a sprint planning meeting.
The Product Owner: Clarifies the details of the product backlog
Product owners make sure that the teams have a healthy backlog of items to work on before the sprint planning meeting begins. They are the ones who refine the details on each backlog item and answer related questions coming from the team. Product owners need to spend more time to prepare the sprint planning agenda than other participants, as their role is to prioritize.
The Team: Defines the work and effort
Teams also perform a critical role in the sprint planning session, as they actually get work done. They should be in full attendance for the meeting and contribute to it as much as they can, so each team member can leave with a clear understanding of priorities what needs to be accomplished during the next sprint.
Choosing the right length for the sprint
How your team eventually performs will depend on many things, the length of the sprint being one of the key factors. There is no one-size-fits-all sprint length though. While Scrum originally encourages teams to work in one-month sprints, many software development teams decided in favor of shorter ones to increase velocity. Velocity is the key metric in scrum, reflecting the amount of work the team can tackle during a single sprint. Thus, working in two-week sprints has become the new game for many. Some teams even switched to one week to get new updates to the end users faster, which is considered to be the shortest agile sprint duration.

That’s why before running a sprint planning meeting, you should choose the right length of the sprint optimal for your team. The length of the sprint depends on team velocity you have at this moment. Adopting the agile approach to work, you most likely want your teams to become faster. We recommend the following length for different types of teams, based on the processes they used before the change:
- 1-week sprint: For teams that are used to fast-paced work and agile environment and are able to produce product updates and new features in a week.
- 2-week sprint: An optimal speed for every team that wants to work in sprints and increase velocity.
- 3-week sprint: For teams that aren’t used to fast-paced structured work.
Teams that worked in silos before and were not set for speed and efficient collaboration would prefer the longer sprint length and then shift to shorter sprints.
Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of shorter and longer sprints respectively.
Shorter sprints
One and two-week sprints open the window of opportunities to learn more with less time. The main advantage of shorter sprints is that they help the teams reveal problems faster. This way, the work is reviewed promptly and teams receive more feedback to improve on the results of their tasks. As the work is broken down into the smallest chunks possible, teams can prioritize more efficiently.
The main disadvantage of shorter sprints (especially 1-week) is that they might be too stressful in the beginning, requiring laser focus and concentration. The good thing is that most teams get used to it after 3–4 sprints.
Longer sprints
The advantage of having sprints that last for three or four weeks is that one doesn’t feel stressed starting out in Scrum.
The disadvantages of longer sprints, though, manifest themselves in fewer opportunities to improve work processes and slower pace in general.
Running an experiment
It always makes sense to experiment until you find the best duration for your context. If you do, you’ll see the results and get feedback from your team immediately. It’s a common practice to start with two-week sprints and move from there.
If you’re satisfied with team velocity and everyone is close to reaching sprint goals, but the progress on the product is far from being meaningful, the sprint length you’ve chosen is probably too short. Try to lengthen the sprint and see what happens.
If the team finds it difficult to reach the sprint goals because saying other important things pop up all the time, then you may have chosen sprints that are too long. Shorten them up to one week and monitor the speed.
Hopefully, you won’t have to deal with two problems above, which means that your team can work productively in two-week sprints.
There’s a 4 sprint rule relating that teams usually adapt to the new Scrum practice in four sprints. If after 4 sprints the team doesn’t produce good results and feels unhappy, the chosen duration should be discontinued in favor of a shorter or longer sprint.
Preparing for the sprint planning meeting
Tim Snyder, Software Delivery & Agile Transformation Leader at USAA cautions teams against doing sprint planning around backlog items that have not yet been refined. Not doing backlog refinement prior to sprint planning and therefore needing to do it in sprint planning, according to the expert, is one of the mistakes product managers commit not knowing enough about the craft.
Preliminary planning is recommended to streamline the sprint planning meeting and prevent it from stretching for hours. Splitting the planning process into two parts, you make sure it’s not overly long and everyone is engaged. It also gives you enough time to make all the necessary steps to get ready for the sprint, like reviewing the roadmap, grooming the backlog, and proposing the next sprint goal.
Experienced product managers prefer to do backlog refinement outside sprint planning. If you’ve decided to work in 2-week sprints, you can divide the planning process into two sessions. At the first one, spend an hour for pre-planning. Sit with a team to prepare a backlog, add new stories and epics, and also estimate the effort a day prior to the actual sprint planning meeting.
Some teams struggle with estimation. Work in sprints in Forecast and make more accurate task estimates. The AI will do the math for you based on historical data. Forecast tip:
If you don’t use any tool to help you make estimations, then an alternative would be to play sprint planning poker, where the team votes for specific estimates to achieve consensus and discusses why a user story takes this amount of time.
How to run an agile sprint planning meeting
What happens during the sprint planning meeting if you’ve already refined the backlog? As the backlog is groomed, you can now start tackling which tasks the team will be focusing on during the sprint. Collaborating together, the team and the product owner figure out the task with the highest priorities, based on the level of business value they are supposed to generate. Here’s what should be on your sprint planning meeting agenda.
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