I just had groceries delivered. One of the items I ordered was a four-pack of square tissues. The store must have been out of those because they substituted an eight-pack of small travel tissues.
You might say the store delivered less value than I expected.
And I’m only a bit disappointed, but imagine how disappointed stakeholders are when teams deliver less value than they should. That’s more frustrating because what our teams deliver is nothing to sneeze at.
One reason teams deliver less value than they could is that they don’t have a medium-term goal to guide their efforts.
A long-term goal is great. It can provide excitement to spur a team to greater creativity, novel solutions, and breakthrough products.
But it’s hard to feel progress against a long-term goal that won’t be achieved for maybe two, three, or more years.
And short-term goals, such as sprint goals, are great at gauging daily progress and keeping everyone focused.
It’s the medium-term goal, perhaps two or three months into the future, that I often find missing. And that I find the most compelling.
This is why I was excited in 2020 when the product goal became an official part of Scrum. The Scrum Guide is silent on how far out a product goal should be, simply calling it a “long-term objective.”
Two problems arise without a goal a few months into the future:
1) Each sprint is prioritized anew. The product owner considers whatever is urgent—that is, whatever stakeholders are yelling about at the moment—and sets the team to work on that.
The urgent is not always that important. My email has been dinging while I write this. I probably need to at least read my new messages today, so they’re urgent. But they’re not as important as writing this email is to me.
Without a medium-term goal to weigh against whatever stakeholders are asking for this red-hot moment, those urgent items will always win.
When a team works on what’s urgent rather than on what’s important, they don’t deliver as much value as they could.
2) Without a medium-term goal to guide it, a team will often bounce from one top priority to the next. Teams, and especially their product owners, can succumb to shiny-object syndrome.
An agile team should absolutely shift away from its current top priority capability once the next work on that item is of lower value than work on some other capability. A product goal achievable in a few months helps a team decide when that’s the case.
As the team begins each new iteration, everyone should be open to abandoning or altering the medium-term goal.
Using a medium-term goal to guide rather than dictate its priorities will help your team succeed with agile.
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