This sprint planning template helps your scrum team get aligned, provide visibility for your stakeholders, and ultimately ship products that delight your users. Here’s how:

• Set clear goals for each sprint and prioritize your backlog in collaboration with your stakeholders, engineers, and product owners.
• Assign tasks and find all relevant task details organized in one place.
• Stay on top of your team’s capacity and progress on what’s shipped for each sprint.

What is sprint planning?

Sprint planning is the first event in the sprint cycle in the Scrum software development framework. During sprint planning, the scrum team collectively defines what their goal for the sprint is, and which product backlog items they will work on, and officially kick off the sprint.

Who is this template for?

This sprint planning template is designed for product managers, scrum masters, engineering or tech leads, and any Agile teams that are looking to level up their sprint planning and product development process.

How do I plan a sprint effectively?

You can mold your sprint planning template to work the way you do. Everything inside Height is fully customizable, with dynamic features to help you run effective retrospective meetings:

1. Start with the big picture

With smart lists, you can pull individual projects from teams' lists into a single, comprehensive product roadmap. Go over your roadmap to map the vision for your product with clear deliverables and get a bird’s eye view of the progress you’ve made so far.

2. Go over backlog items

Zoom into specific tasks, and even fully-detailed subtasks, to identify the user stories you want to tackle in your next sprint.

Align with your stakeholders on any new issues, impacts, and dependencies you need to add to the backlog. Input these new items with a standardized ticket template using Task forms, so you capture all the important information your team needs.

3. Plan your sprint

Define the goal for your sprint collectively in your sprint planning meeting, and the corresponding tickets your team will work through.

You can add as much or as little details as you’d like to the tasks with custom attributes like: Story points, Priority, and more to help you narrow down on the critical items. Quickly identify what’s on your team members’ plates so you can assign tasks and due dates based on their capacity.

4. Run your sprint

Visually track progress from to-do to done, see who’s working on what, and manage bottlenecks as they come up with a drag-and-drop Kanban board. You can also switch to a list, timeline, or calendar view so you can see your sprint from all angles.

With seamless in-task real-time chat, and integrations that cross-post your comments from Slack, GitHub, GitLab, or Figma right into Height, you have a centralized record of all the context about a task so you can get up to speed in no time.

What are the five stages of an Agile sprint cycle?

A sprint cycle is a set timeframe, usually two to four weeks, when an Agile team delivers a specific amount of work by going through these five steps:

1. Product backlog refinement:

Go through the items on the backlog, make sure they’re all relevant and detailed, and sort them by priority.

2. Sprint planning:

Plan the sprint, define its goal, and assign who needs to work on which tasks -- then kick off.

3. Daily standup:

Sync with the scrum team for a 10-15 minutes standup everyday to go over the tasks they’ve finished, what they’re working on next, and any blockers.

4. Sprint review:

Review what the team has delivered and if the sprint goal was met.

5. Sprint retrospective:

Look back at your process during the last sprint to adjust and improve the next one.