Sprint Goals as the Health Check of Delivery

2025-08-17 by Tomas Tulka

What Sprint Goals reveal about your Scrum process and why it matters.

Scrum often gets criticized, sometimes for good reasons. Yet many teams have built successful products using it. Usually, the problem isn’t Scrum itself but how it’s implemented. Following the textbook too rigidly or copying practices from other organizations without understanding why can create a process full of unnecessary ceremonies that slow the team down and hurt the product.

Scrum creates a process. Any process, by definition, might seem to go against the Agile idea of responding to change rather than following a plan. But Scrum also embraces change through incremental development. Each increment is a small, tangible step that delivers value and helps the team adjust as needed.

A Sprint is more than just a fixed period of time—it represents a releasable piece of the product that delivers something useful to users. At the heart of a Sprint is the Sprint Goal: a short, clear statement of what the team aims to achieve by the end of the Sprint. It keeps everyone focused, guiding collaboration and decision-making.

A good Sprint Goal is simple enough that, when the Sprint ends, it’s obvious whether it has been achieved. That clarity lets the team and stakeholders celebrate the success of the delivered value.

The real question is: how clear are your Sprint Goals? Are they easy to understand and focused on value?

Or are they too broad and not aligned, sometimes more like a list of tasks dressed up as a goal?

Or have you given up on Sprint Goals altogether?

When the business value is clear and well-communicated, a good Sprint Goal comes naturally. But if you start every Sprint trying to make sense of a random mix of tasks thrown together at the last minute, your Scrum is broken.

There are many possible reasons for the latter. Maybe the team is too big to focus on a single goal. Large teams often face too many dependencies and bottlenecks. Maybe the team isn’t autonomous and depends on other teams to deliver value on its own. That makes work frustrating and unrewarding. Maybe the area of responsibility is too broad, forcing team members to constantly switch contexts and waste time relearning details. Or maybe the team is disconnected from the real business, just working through tickets without knowing their actual meaning for customers. In such detached teams, motivation drops, and progress suffers.

In the worst case, there is simply no vision. No clear idea of what the increment should achieve, or what the real value for the customers might be. Poor management, weak product planning, missing feedback, or failed market analysis often cause this situation.

Whatever the reason, aligning with business value is essential for a successful product. A product may look good, work fast, or have many features, but it will fail if it isn’t useful to anybody. Broken Sprint Goals highlight this clearly.

If you want to see how a company really works—whether you are a consultant, investor, or developer interviewing for a job—ask what their current Sprint Goal is. If they struggle to answer, or if the goal makes no sense or is missing entirely, consider it a red flag.

Happy Sprint Goals!