Driving Value With Sprint Goals

Sep 18, 2023

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On this episode of The Delivery Space podcast, we are joined by Maarten Dalmijn, the mind behind the much-acclaimed book on "Driving Value with Sprint Goals: Humble Plans, Exceptional Results".In our conversation, Maarten helps us tackle some pressing questions that many of us encounter in the software development industry:

How can we move past the rigidity often seen in traditional planning and create an environment that is open to change and promotes collaboration?
Isn't it about time we questioned the reliance on hierarchical structures, given that the market seems to be leaning towards more flexible, team-centric approaches?

Maarten has been in the trenches for more than 10 years wearing many hats that are necessary to deliver value. He has worked with many award-winning start-ups, scale-ups, and corporations in various roles before taking the leap as an independent Product Management, Agile,and Scrum consultant working with companies all over the globe. Maarten believes in 'less, but better'. #productmanagement is aboutgetting the right things done. It is easy to come up with a list of things to add to make something better. It is much harder to decidewhich things to leave out to make something better. We discussed:

Why storytelling is important? 3:18
Why Maarten picked the subject of Sprint Goals for his first book 7:18
How Sprint Goals empower teams 9:38
Why it’s so important to get a good read of your environment (refCynefin) 10:59
How Friction (frequent surprises) impacts our plans in complex environments 12:00
What Humble Planning is and how it can help us adapt and respond effectively in complex software delivery environments 13:06
Roadmapping hell experiences 16:28
You can have as many experts as you want to plan, but in a complex environment there will always be surprises 19:00
There’s no sub team in a Scrum team 20:03
Maarten’s FOCUS acronym for crafting Sprint Goals 21:40
Complex environments and emerging plans in the movie industry, whatcan we learn from this? 24:31
What happens if there’s no Sprint Goal? The link between Sprint Goals and technical debt 29:20

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