Stakeholders or Power Wielders?
Sprint reviews are the right place for stakeholders to ask questions, and to give some feedback from their perspective. Such questions and feedback can sometimes have the undesired effect of sounding overly critical or judgmental, an impression that may be amplified by the fact that some stakeholders are in managerial roles.
It’s important to remember that people in management positions (which is often the kind of people taking the stakeholder role in sprint reviews) don’t always automatically speak from a position of power. First and foremost, they have a different perspective, a more outside perspective, than the team running the sprint review.
One thing where that often creates confusion is the notion of achievement, or what constitutes a viable sprint goal.
In the spirit of Scrum, each sprint is a place “where ideas are turned into value”. Value! This should be something tangible, for someone - ideally, this is the ultimate customer. Value is however also added if, for example, thanks to a refactoring, the quality and maintainability of the code base increase. In this case, the value increases for the engineering team, but also for the ultimate customer, because the team will be able to deliver new features and fix bugs more quickly.
So then, ideally, a sprint goal is not a checkbox, but a description of added (incremental) value, expressed as outcome rather than output. It is meant to be a “single objective … encouraging the Scrum Team to work together rather than on separate initiatives”.
Back to the stakeholder perspective. Stakeholders, not being part of the team, have a hard time understanding a sprint goal that’s formulated as output because that’s often expressed in team-internal language. An outcome, however, inevitably takes on some form of customer perspective. There are two main advantages to this: apart from stakeholders having an easier time appreciating it, the team also understands, implicitly, what kind of value it is adding for whatever customers by completing the sprint goal.
Looping all the way back to the beginning: if stakeholders sound overly critical or judgmental when challenging sprint goals, that likely has to do with perspective, and with what may look like a missing connection of the team’s work to customer value. It’s not so hard to address this: consider thinking about sprint goals as achieving outcome instead of generating output.
Tags: work