How we improved our Sprint Planning and Retros using Miro…

…and how our team evolved.

A few years ago when I started the Scrum journey with a new team we struggled with the simplest things.

I think it takes a team several steps to adapt to a new methodology and mindset. First, the team struggled to understand and apply the simplest events from the Scrum framework. Sometimes we had to repeat the reason for a single event over and over again. Why we are sitting together now and what is the goal of the event? In addition, the team struggled to understand the empirical approach and empirical problem-solving strategy. As time went on, they understood more and more how empirical approaches can help us develop our product better and faster.

Planning Meeting [Unsplash]

However, it always felt like we were taking two steps forward and then one step backward. After an initial phase of understanding the why, it was then a matter of figuring out the how. Over many sprints, we refined Retrospectives and Planning, for example. Retrospective, Review, and Planning are closely related and all contribute to the momentum of Scrum. In a previous article, I wrote about the continuous improvement process of the Retrospective. Today I want to focus on planning and explain how we found our mode of planning and how we now manage to keep planning in a flow state from sprint to sprint.

The three Phases a Team goes through

But first, let’s go back to the phases we’ve gone through as a team, which I’ve already seen some teams go through.

I always observe that teams go through different phases on their journey to apply the Scrum Framework.

1st phase:

Status — The team is new to agile methodologies and empirical thinking. They have no experience with Scrum and have not yet internalized the agile mindset.
Focus — The team learns the why and looks for appropriate formats and methods to pick up. It experiments with different formats.

2nd phase:

Status — The team has understood the why but has not yet internalized agile values and the agile mindset. It tries to find a way to apply what it has learned well and efficiently. The focus is on…