Driving Value With Sprint Goals

The Delivery Space

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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