Leverage Sprint Goals to Supercharge Teamwork and Build Winning Products

There are many books on Scrum and how to do Scrum the right way. This isn't one of those books. Driving Value with Sprint Goals will teach you how to deliver exceptional value.

To build great products, all teams and participants must align behind clear goals that deliver real value (outcomes)--not just more features (output). Sprint Goals are your most powerful tool for achieving this alignment, but many teams avoid, misuse, or struggle with them. Maarten Dalmijn guides you through defining, creating, and executing on Sprint Goals that deliver outstanding value to customers and the business.

This concise guide is packed with strategies and concepts for building high-performing teams that accelerate the delivery of value. As you reconsider critical Scrum and product management processes through the lens of the Sprint Goal, you can transform your entire organization from being low-value "feature factories" to delivering high-value outcomes.

• Understand how making plans doesn't start with planning but with intent
• Use humble planning together with intent to deal with surprises as you discover and learn what's necessary while you do the work
• Establish a laser-like focus on driving the outputs that lead to the most valuable outcomes
• Learn how to use Sprint Goals throughout the Sprint, at Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, and for the ongoing work of building high-performing teams
• Learn what happens when Sprint Goals are absent or misapplied, and how to avoid those pitfalls

Driving Value with Sprint Goals will reshape the way you think about delivering value by offering a fresh and cohesive perspective invaluable to every Product Owner, Product Manager, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, and tech executive.

"Maarten masterfully bridges the gap between Scrum and product management. If you want to create products that truly make a difference, you need to read this book."

--Pawel Huryn, Author, Product Coach

Table of Contents

Part I: Why Goals Matter

Chapter 1: Imperfect Plans, Flawed Execution, and Unpredictable Results

Chapter 2: More Friction, More Surprises

Chapter 3: Countering Friction by Leading with Intent

Chapter 4: Tales of Opposing Goals

Part I: Overall Takeaways

Part II: Sprint Goals Are the Beating Heart of Scrum

Chapter 5: A Featherlight Introduction to Scrum

Chapter 6: The Fundamental Role of Sprint Goals in Scrum

Chapter 7: What Happens When You Don't Use Sprint Goals?

Chapter 8: Two Very Different Versions of Scrum

Part II Overall Takeaways

Part III: Driving Value with Sprint Goals

Chapter 9: Creating Sprint Goals

Chapter 10: Sprint Goals in Practice at the Scrum Events

Chapter 11: More Features, More Value?

Chapter 12: Driving Outcomes with Outputs

Chapter 13: Product Vision: A Purposeful Direction for Your Product

Chapter 14: Product Strategy

Part III Overall Takeaways

Part IV: Overcoming Common Sprint Goal Obstacles

Chapter 15: Scrum Anti-Patterns That Amplify Friction and Surprises

Chapter 16: Dealing with Common Sprint Goal Obstacles

Chapter 17: From Stakeholder Management to Stakeholder Inclusion

Chapter 18: Scaling Scrum Without Frameworks

Chapter 19: Empowering Teams to Discover Better Ways of Delivering Value

Review

"Maarten masterfully bridges the gap between Scrum and product management. If you want to create products that truly make a difference, you need to read this book."

--Pawel Huryn, Author, Product Coach

"It is not just a book on Sprint Goals. It's an essential read for all those who work in a complex environment and try to make sense of things.

"Maarten not only writes about Sprint Goals, but he also explains the hardest part of agile--what agile mindset means. This book will lead you to experience many breakthroughs. From what Scrum really is about, through why copy-pasting a scaling framework is not a recipe for success, to the biggest of them all--a breakthrough from a project-driven mentality to an agile one."

--Maria Chec, Head of Agile Practice and Creator at Agile State of Mind

"Maarten's relentless focus on value delivery instead of mechanically churning out new features is a breath of fresh air. This book will help you to up your game, align around value, and use the power of sprint goals to build great products."

--Chris Stone, The Virtual Agile Coach

"This book is a must-read if you want to understand Scrum's essence and empower your team. Instead of covering how to do Scrum right, Maarten shows you how to leverage the framework to deliver value. Intertwined with personal stories and history lessons, you'll find concrete examples, models, and practical advice to help you build empowered teams that deliver the desired outcomes."

--Jenny Herald, VP of Evangelism at Quantive and host of the Dreams with Deadlines podcast

"Starting with some schoolchildren dropped in the dark on an island who manage to find their way back, the author explains in a down-to-earth way how breaking projects down into sprints helps us to overcome the universal problem of friction. The book brings insights to daily practice in a clear, simple, and engaging way."

--Stephen Bungay, author of The Art of Action

"I don't think there is anything like it in the area of Scrum. It reads like a novel and is stuffed full of brilliant ideas and insights. Maarten has a knack for illustrating complex concepts with inspiring examples completely unrelated to Scrum and Agile. This book will change the way you think about Scrum and Agile. I would recommend it to anyone remotely interested in a new way of working!"

--Erik de Bos, writer of the Agile Thoughts newsletter

"'Sprint Goals are the beating heart of Scrum,' writes Maarten Dalmijn, and this couldn't be truer. Without them, Scrum falls apart. Unfortunately, we know from scientific research that many Scrum teams don't use Sprint Goals or struggle greatly with them. This book makes a powerful argument for why Scrum teams need Sprint Goals and offers invaluable anecdotes, practical tips, and guidelines to help you get started right away."

--Christiaan Verwijs, author of the Zombie Scrum Survival Guide, co-founder of The Liberators, and Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org

"If you're looking for a Sprint Goal-writing recipe book to blindly follow, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for an engaging tour of ideas, which helps you discover the ecosystem to create meaningful goals, you'd be wise to read this book."

--Jem Jelly, Certified Scrum Trainer & Consultant

About the Author

Maarten Dalmijn is a consultant, speaker and trainer at Dalmijn Consulting. Maarten helps teams to beat the feature factory all over the world. Millions of practitioners have read his best-practice articles on Agile, Scrum, and Product Management. He specializes in helping companies to build empowered teams that can discover better ways of delivering value. Maarten is a frequent speaker at Fortune 500 companies, government organizations and international industry conferences. He has worked with many award-winning start-ups and scale-ups. Maarten is an ambassador and editor at Serious Scrum, the largest Scrum publication on Medium.