Work backwards from demo-able sprint goals
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"Hey, Tommy how was the last sprint going?", I was in a sub-team's sprint retrospect and planning session.
"It went pretty well", Tommy said, "I completed 5 of the 6 tasks."
"Sounds great!", I was excited, "What can you demo?"
"Err, nothing new." Tommy hesitated, "I have demoed the stuff in previous sprint."
"But you completed most of the tasks! What do they mean to stakeholders?"
"I completed the Application Security review. I finalized the build pipeline. I am ready to turn on our infrastructure in production." Tommy explained, "but all of these are not demo-able."
"Are they really not?", I questioned, "The point of sprint demo is that it forces us to work backwards from an end result that is meaningful to stakeholders. You said you completed most of the tasks, but what is the 'end result' of this sprint that makes sense to stakeholders like me?"
"I finalize the security approval and build pipeline to turn on the infrastructure to run X in production." Tommy answered. "But X is not fully ready yet for automated deployment."
"If you manually download a dummy X to a production host, can you show X can run on the infrastructure that has been enabled?" I followed up.
"Yes, I suppose. But it won't be valuable to any customers." Tommy was confused.
"But it is meaningful to stakeholders. You demonstrate the infrastructure is fully ready end to end, with security approval, running in at least one production host." I explained, "It shows your progress of the sprint. You have to manually download a dummy X to make it run, but that is OK. Stakeholders will appreciate your demo and understand how close you are towards the end goal.
Suppose you are a contractor building a house for me. Every two weeks I would love to see you are making progress. For example, even you've only poured the foundation of the house, it is not a livable house yet, but if I am the client, I would love to see the foundation square and solid.
You planned your sprint as 6 tasks. But as your stakeholder, I would rather not dive into the nitty-gritty details of the tasks, just like I don't want to learn how the concrete is poured into the house foundation. Instead I want to see what is meaningful to me - the foundation. The tasks - pouring concrete - are mechanisms to get what I want see, but they are not the goal."
"I get what you mean now." Tommy said, "It is like everything we do in Amazon. To set a right sprint goal, we need to work backwards from what customers or stakeholders want to see, and find a way to demonstrate how we are closer to that goal."
"There we go. Customer Obsession and Work Backwards! Now could you demo something valuable I can understand?"