Make your sprint planning meeting visual and fast

  • Peter Parkes
    Peter Parkes
    Co-founder

We’re not agile purists at Qualdesk, but we find a lot of the methodology super helpful. It allows us to stay focused on user needs and gives us a framework for iteration.

We do our sprint planning visually, and this brings three distinct benefits:

1 You get a better plan

It’s incredibly difficult to make sense of user stories, bugs and other tasks if they’re in columns on a board, or in a backlog list.

Whether it’s on a whiteboard online or a physical wall, a 2D canvas gives you and your team an opportunity to zoom out, quite literally, and get a sense of the totality of your plan. Is it the right size? Have we missed anything?

Sprint planning using a whiteboard online

The freedom to move things around, create visual groups and clusters, and to experiment with a number of different hypothetical plans during the meeting, dramatically improves the quality of plan you ultimately commit to.

2 You get a less boring sprint planning meeting

No more death-by-screenshare. Much as I’m sure you love watching someone scroll through Jira – or doing the scrolling yourself – there’s a simple way to make sprint planning meetings more engaging and interactive:

Give everyone a cursor.

This is easy to do in the office, where everyone gets to use the board, but in the world of remote work or hybrid work, you need a digital whiteboard that lets everyone work with your tickets during the sprint planning meeting on an equal footing.

3 You have more time to spend on getting real work done

This last one is self-explanatory. If you can get to an agreement more quickly, and don’t have to spend time writing up the sprint afterwards, everyone gets more time to spend on value-generating work.

That goes for product managers, agile coaches / scrum masters, and the engineers and designers on the team.

Where does Qualdesk fit into all of this?