Product Manager Sprint Checklist — Sprint Planning and Sprint Management from Kickoff through Retrospective
While there are a number of articles about how to groom your backlog and conduct Sprint planning from the perspective of prioritization, I haven’t found a comprehensive checklist of all of the steps that scrum, Product and development/engineering teams need to take for the full management of a Sprint. So my team and I made one!
We put together this checklist in order to document and scale our Product team and processes. This checklist goes through every step that we take during Sprint management. For context, we use Jira for ticket management and our Sprints currently run for four (4) week intervals (though this checklist can be modified for 1–6 week Sprints and beyond). Each of our Product Managers goes through this process for the engineers that are working on their respective Epics/projects.
Check it out and let me know what steps your team takes that aren’t on here.
Product Team Sprint Planning (Monday the week before Sprint end)
- Product Manager Sprint/Epic goal(s) identification and cross reference with prioritized tickets
- Product to add task tickets related to Epics to the Sprint
- Product prioritization of backlog & updates/clarification of acceptance criteria to stories, tasks, bugs
- Product initial ticket sizing and assignment to engineers
- Cross reference total points per engineer with available Sprint velocity — Ensure team has enough bandwidth to address issues that come in over the Sprint based on prior Sprint velocity
Engineering Manager Sprint Planning (Tuesday the week before Sprint end)
- Product Managers review engineers planned work with engineering leadership
- Engineering leadership updates/verbal signoff at end of meeting
Sprint Review, Demo & Retrospective Meeting (Friday, final week (4th week) of the Sprint)
- Product posts end of Sprint note with action items for engineers including having engineers thread their demo plans
- Product pulls Sprint reports and creates deck for Sprint review
- Team fills out retrospective document
- Product, Engineering + Design demo at Sprint review
- Product presents Sprint review reports & cross reference epics & sprints with goals
- Team holds retrospective (Retrospective action items taken by Product during meeting to revisit)
Open New Sprint
- Beginning of Sprint — start new Sprint in Jira
- Product leadership build Sprint kickoff deck before kickoff
Sprint Kickoff Meeting (First day of Sprint)
- Engineers review story points & acceptance criteria by noon first day of Sprint
- Engineers sync with Product for confirmation of tickets for the Sprint (12–1pm first day of the Sprint)
- Engineers sign off on Sprint/Epic goals
Bi-Weekly Product Team Meeting — Includes Product Marketing Team (Tuesday afternoon)
- Product Managers update Epic status document in advance of meeting
- During meeting — review of Epics and the progress/status of each
- Discuss/escalate any outstanding action items
Weekly Epic Check-In Meetings for Each Epic (Wednesdays)
- Product Manager to post agenda in channel 24 hours prior to meeting
- Make updates to schedule in the technical design document during meeting
- Product to facilitate and post action items in channel at end of meeting
Backlog Refinement (Weekly Jira Enhancements Meeting/Daily Backlog Review)
- Product team review enhancement requests
- Assign tickets to a prospective Sprint, assign story points, and an engineer OR label them as “won’t do/icebox”
- Change any enhancement tickets that will be prioritized into tasks
Sprint Cleanup (Bi-weekly)
- Product team to review backlog and current Sprint bi-weekly to ensure progress and clean up tickets based on engineer velocity
- Update roadmap as applicable
Close Sprint (Post-Deployment on Last Friday of Sprint)
- End of Sprint — close out Sprint, move all open tickets to following Sprint
- Review goals and progress against goals
Close Out “Won’t Do/Ice Boxed” Items
- Product to deploy all “Won’t Do/Ice Boxed” items at the end of every third Sprint so that we retain ticket history but move out of backlog
Repeat!
Let me know your thoughts on any ways that our team can continue to advance our processes! Anything that you are going to bring back to your team?
