Scrums, Task Management, and Sprint Ceremonies 📆

Hey Amazing PM! It’s Areesha :)

Yeahhh, this Monday is about teams and task management 🤩

And this is what will keep haunting you every day if you don’t learn it 😵‍💫

So let’s begin!

Why do I need to learn task management?

Well, unless it’s a god’s gift, you can’t ace task management of cross-functional teams without learning it. 🤷‍♀️

Cross-functional team management involves ensuring work gets done within a given timeline and resources by people from all the different teams that are part of your product development process.

If you do not have clarity about their tasks, you’re likely to get in trouble with product delivery 🥴.

How do you deal with your engineering, sales, and design teams? How do you track their progress? How do ensure they deliver right on time?

What if any/all of your teams are working part-time or have been outsourced by the company, you still need to track their progress. Or, what if you need work done by a team that doesn’t work closely with you?

How would you do that?

Let’s understand all of this today! 🚀

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Agile vs Waterfall Methods of Product Management

Agile and Waterfall are two contrasting approaches to product management, each with its strengths and weaknesses.

Waterfall Method 🌊 

Imagine a waterfall – a sequential flow of water cascading down.

The waterfall method follows a linear, step-by-step approach where each phase must be completed entirely before moving to the next.

Once something falls in the flow, there’s no going back 👀.

Here are the sequential steps of the waterfall method:

• Requirement Gathering: This phase involves meticulous documentation of all project requirements, leaving minimal room for changes later 💀. If anything goes wrong here and is not addressed before moving out of this phase, it will directly impact the end product.
  
  … Do you sense a recipe for disaster? 👀
  

• Design & Development: Based on the frozen requirements, the product is designed, built, and tested thoroughly.

• Deployment & Maintenance: Once everything is signed off, the final product is deployed and maintained.

Pros and Cons of Waterfall

Pros:

• Clear Structure: The defined phases and milestones offer a clear roadmap for the project, making it easier to track progress and manage resources.

• Suited for Well-Defined Projects: If requirements are clear and unlikely to change, Waterfall provides a predictable and efficient path to completion.

• Strong Documentation: The emphasis on detailed documentation ensures everyone is on the same page and reduces confusion.

Cons:

• Inflexible: Adapting to changes during the development process can be difficult and expensive. If new requirements emerge mid-project, it can throw the entire schedule and budget off track. Ugh…

• Slow Time-to-Market: Since the final product isn't available until the very end, it can take a long time to reach the market and gather feedback.

• Limited Customer Input: Customers have little opportunity to provide feedback until the final product is delivered, potentially leading to a product that doesn't meet their needs.

Agile Method 🔁 

Agile is a more flexible and iterative approach. Think of it as a continuous cycle of planning, designing, developing, testing, and refining the product. Agile is the most preferred method of product management today due to its flexible and iterative nature.

Here are the iterative steps of the Agile method:

• Planning: A short-term plan (typically 1-4 weeks) called a sprint is created, outlining the functionalities to be developed.

• Development & Testing: The team works collaboratively in short bursts (sprints) to deliver a working piece of the product. Testing and feedback are integrated throughout the process.

• Review & Retrospective: At the end of each sprint, the team reviews progress, gathers feedback, and identifies areas for improvement in the next sprint.

Pros and Cons of Agile

Pros:

• Flexibility & Adaptability: Agile readily embraces changes in requirements or market conditions. New features can be incorporated into future sprints based on discussions with stakeholders and prioritization by the product manager.

• Faster Feedback & Delivery: With frequent testing and delivery cycles, customer feedback is incorporated early and often, resulting in a product that better meets their needs.

• Improved Team Collaboration: The focus on short sprints and continuous communication fosters a more collaborative and responsive work environment.

Cons:

• Uncertain Deadlines: While progress is made in every sprint, predicting a final delivery date can be challenging due to its iterative nature.

• Heavy Reliance on Communication: Agile requires a high level of communication and collaboration within the team to function effectively.

• Documentation Can Lack Detail: Since requirements may evolve, detailed documentation may not be prioritized, potentially leading to knowledge gaps for new team members.

🌊 Choose Waterfall if: Requirements are clear and unlikely to change, the project is well-defined, and a structured approach is preferred.

🔁 Choose Agile if: Flexibility and adaptability are crucial, early and frequent customer feedback is desired, and the project involves some unknowns.

What are Sprints 🏃‍♀️?

A sprint is a fixed-length period, typically lasting between 1 to 4 weeks, where a development team works to complete a specific set of functionalities.

Features of a sprint:

• Short and time-bound: Sprints keep projects moving at a fast pace and help teams adapt to changes quickly. The ‘story points’ or timeframes keep everyone focused and avoid unexpected delays.

• Piece-by-piece delivery: The goal of each sprint is to deliver a usable piece of the product, allowing for early feedback and iteration.

• Iterative process: Sprints are part of an iterative development process. Teams continuously learn and improve the product based on feedback received after each sprint.

Cross-Functional Team Management

A cross-functional team brings together individuals from various organizational departments with diverse skills and expertise. This ensures the team has all the necessary capabilities to complete product development independently, without relying on external resources. 😎

Task Management with Daily Scrums

A daily scrum is a brief (typically 15-minute) meeting held by the Product Manager with their cross-functional teams to synchronize progress, identify roadblocks, and plan for the upcoming day.

Here is why you should do daily scrums as a PM, even though you hate to 👇:

• Improved Communication: Daily scrums provide a dedicated forum for team members to communicate, share updates, and ask for help.

• Early Problem Identification: Issues are raised quickly, allowing the team to address them before they escalate and impact the project's progress.

• Increased Focus: The short, time-boxed nature of daily scrums keeps the team focused on the most pressing tasks for the day.

Driving Daily Scrums Effectively

Here are some tips for managing cross-functional teams with daily scrums:

• Set Clear Goals: Ensure everyone understands the sprint goal and how their tasks contribute to achieving it.

• Promote Collaboration: As a product manager, encourage teams to collaborate, help, and support each other during daily scrums in their tasks.

• Focus on Actionable Items: Use daily scrums to identify roadblocks from each team and develop clear plans to overcome them.

• Maintain Transparency: Keep a visible task board or backlog to track progress and ensure everyone is on the same page. Share access to the task board with every team member.
  
  Seriously, share your screen during daily scrums with the team so people can view the progress of other teams/members. This makes collaboration between teams more efficient. 😉

Sprint Ceremonies: Retrospective, Backlog Grooming & Planning

Sprint Retrospective 👁️

The Sprint Retrospective is a collaborative meeting held at the end of each sprint. It is conducted to reflect on what went well, what didn't, and how they can improve their processes for the upcoming sprint.

Key Activities:

• Reviewing the Sprint Goal: Discuss whether the sprint goal was achieved and the factors that contributed to success or roadblocks encountered.

• Identifying Improvements: Brainstorm and collaboratively identify areas where the team can improve their processes, tools, or communication.
  
  For example, if the last UAT (user acceptance testing) testing session did not go well due to a lack of customer feedback, plan ways to enhance strong communication with customers and get enough feedback to facilitate the next UAT process.
  

• Actionable Items: Prioritize improvement ideas and turn them into concrete action items with clear ownership for the next sprint.

• Transparency and Openness: Encourage honest and open discussion to create a safe space for sharing feedback.

Backlog Grooming & Planning 🤵

Backlog grooming, also known as product backlog refinement, is a meeting held before the start of a sprint, typically towards the end of the previous sprint. It is conducted to work together to refine and prioritize the product backlog.

• Clarifying User Stories: The team delves into user stories in the backlog, ensuring they are well-defined, and understood by everyone.

• Estimating Effort: The team collaboratively estimates the effort required to complete each user story, often using story points or another relative sizing technique.

• Prioritization: The product manager, in collaboration with the team, prioritizes user stories based on their value and contribution to the overall product vision.

• Breaking Down Large Stories: If user stories are too complex, they might be broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks.
  
  User stories are tasks on the board that one or more members work on to complete.

Let’s understand this with an example.

A team follows a 4-week sprint and is working on developing the Churn Prediction Model (the working piece) for a marketing campaign management tool.

The involved teams here are AI (for model building), Development (UI and backend), Engineering (to source customer data to the AI team and sourcing model results into the application)

You as a Product Manager of this tool, need to understand the development, testing, and feedback efforts of each team.

First, you will ask these teams about the various tasks and sub-tasks they must work on to implement this feature in the application. Make sure you inquire about any dependencies they might have in completing their tasks.

Ask teams to estimate timelines for testing and feedback fixes separately for an overall task, if applicable. If so, add it as a sub-task for the respective story (task).

By testing, here I’m talking about the internal testing that these teams must conduct before pushing for testing by the QA team and/or you, the product manager.

Second, you will assign story points (or time estimates) against each task and sub-task after communicating with team members. Let them know that beyond the specified timeline, they would be expected to deliver the feature flawlessly (almost - because there’s always scope for improvements if not mistakes 🙂).

Third, once these tasks are completed by the teams, you or the QA team will conduct user acceptance testing (UAT) to test the model’s results, frontend design, and functionality in the application.

Sprint Demos: Reviewing the Sprint

The sprint demo is sometimes referred to as a sprint review. ✔

It is a time-boxed meeting held at the end of each sprint where the development team showcases the work they've accomplished during the sprint to stakeholders and key players.

For complex sprints with many tasks, some teams might hold mid-sprint demos to showcase completed work and get early feedback.

Goals of a Sprint Demo:

• Transparency & Visibility: Provides stakeholders with transparency into the team's progress and the evolving product.

• Gather Feedback: Allows stakeholders to see the working product, ask questions, and provide valuable feedback that can be incorporated into future sprints.

• Celebrate Achievements: Allows the team to celebrate their accomplishments and showcase their hard work.

• Align Expectations: Helps ensure everyone involved is on the same page regarding the product vision and development roadmap.

I hope this post helped you understand why it is important for a product manager to look into everything! Let me know your thoughts!

That’s all for today 👋!

Stay tuned for some freshly baked PM tips, strategies, insights, weekly Q/A digests, and more right into your inbox!🚀

Cya!
Areesha ❤️ 

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Areesha Shaikh

• Aneesha S

• Twice the Impact PM