AGILE Deep Dive - Sprint Management 101
As an aspiring Product Manager, I want to know the broad strokes of managing a sprint, so as to better understand the product day to day
To some in the tech world, AGILE is religion.
To others, AGILE is 5 letter word reserved for hucksters and grifters, breading contempt in its every utterance.
Wherever you stand on the spectrum Agile development, and SCRUM are omnipresent words in the technology space.
The execution of Agile Development is not a job unto itself, and I’d recommend you stay clear of any role framed as such. Agile is intended to be a useful framework to operate efficiently in the world of software development.
It’s a series of principles and processes that can make both you and your team ship1 better, more relevant code that your users will over.
No matter how good at “Agile” you are - you need to be first good at delivering a core competency in a software development team before anything Agile will be of use.
The Chicago Bulls of today could run the triangle offense, but it’s not winning them the NBA Championship. It’s that they ran the triangle with Michael Jordan that they were able to become the greatest team of all time.
As a Software Developer - If you can’t code effectively, all the Agile principles in the world won’t make you valuable to an organization.
As a Product Manager - if you cannot prioritize the most important feature to buy - all the Sprint Management in the world won’t separate you from the competition.
Where knowledge of Agile becomes useful when you are in the game, managing a promising product, and attempting to ship the right code as efficiently as you can.
Agile won’t in itself win against the competition - but it will give you more bites at the product release apple. Squeezing out an extra feature or 2 a sprint adds up over time. Prioritize right, and Agile Principles could be that extra edge you need to beat down your biggest competitors.
And nowhere is that more clear than in the Sprint
The Sprint in a Nutshell
The Sprint is where all software development takes place. It’s the epicenter of all things Agile.
The Sprint is a discrete period of time where a software development team commits to deliver a list of production-ready code enhancements - typically composed of user stories (New Code) or bug fixes (Repairing old code).
Every Agile Principle is intended to feed into a productive Sprint - where all code gets written. The industry standard length for a Sprint is 2 weeks, but I’ve seen 3 or 1-week sprints as well.
In the sprint, the expectation is code gets written, reviewed, and QA’d. After the sprint completes, all tickets are merged together into a new branch of code, and deployed into various environments, with the final being Production. Jira has a slew of functionality for SCRUM projects all focused on sprint management.
Sprints are assigned a number for organizational purposes. With each sprint comes production deploy dates projected. At large organizations, the entire year’s sprint release schedule gets approved and published annually.
These sprint dates are important, as that is how tech companies forecast the delivery of critical functionality.
When speaking to internal stakeholders dying for a new feature - this makes it easy to tell them “We’re queuing up the Sprint 29, which deploys to production on <INSERT DATE>”.
In short - a sprint is a tool that encourages iterative processes and coherent deadlines.
How a Product Manager Should Think about a Sprint
As a Product Manager - you need to be thinking and planning in sprints. You (typically) get 6 a quarter. It’s best to make them count.
PMs need to be able to at all times:
PROGRAMMING BREAK
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers to walk through the high-level overview of what sprint management entails.
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